two lost souls
by Amalin
Summary: "...we're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year..." A collection of seasonal pieces, complete with parentheses. H/D slashiness.
1. autumn (fire)

As usual, I am the sole owner of nothing. J. K. Rowling's got 'em all. 

Incoherence, parentheses, and Draco. Season ficlet in parts. Mild slash, in later parts, but rather twisted. Because Christy is a wondrous Christy indeed, all fun dedications go to her. So, to Chriz and her wonderful (albeit odd) HP couple ideas. ~cheers~ Lots of love, rainbow girl. ^-^ 

Note: Just a by-product of Untouchable Face boredom. That should take precedence, so don't expect regularity with the next eight parts. So yeah, without further ado, here 'tis.   


Part One : Fire   


  


Dead leaves scatter from the bare skeleton trees, scraping and collecting in the gutter like the flickering remnants of a bonfire. (Purgation.) Laughter trickles through the crowd: a communicable disease, a drug seeping about through one shared needle. (I do not care to partake.) Who is the brunt of their laughter, I wonder? Well, for once they are not the receivers of mine, so it does not much matter. 

A solitary puddle remains, sole evidence of the tempestuous deluge last night. The sky is now cloudless and aquamarine, reflected in the quicksilver depths of that last watery refuge. 

Her last words: _He is your son, Lucius._

Her breath was barely a whisper on the sterilized air (but what wasn't sterilized in that accursed place?) and her bony fingers were still adorned with half the family fortune. Gaze fixed, unseeing, on the incompetent Muggle nurse - Father, curse him, demanding the use of a Muggle institution. (Afraid of the secrets she might disclose in her delirium, are you? You hate Muggles.) 

The door is polished oak, one crack running down the center. It brushes as the fiery leaves do, scraping across the floorboards in a whisper. While there is a table of teachers and several locals, most of the tavern is a sea of black. Above this darkened mire I catch a glimpse of autumn leaf locks - yes, there they are, those inseparable three. Lovely. 

She had been but a shadow; ivory complexion turned sallow, prominent cheekbones jutting and makeup brushed unnaturally (she looked like a child's scribbled drawing, reduced to sprawling lines and too-bright colors) over her gaunt face. And he, _he_, had not even been there. 

"No, thanks. Nothing." 

The coins weigh heavy in my pockets, their cool and slippery surfaces comfort to my fingertips. But I am not thirsty, and now is no time to get drunk. Tucked between the metal disks (all money was, really) and the pliant handle of my wand is a scrap of parchment. I pull at it, curious- 

"How's dear mum doing, Malfoy?" His freckles - yes, I can concentrate on those. Pale skin, shocking mass of fiery hair, tattered robes… Expression expectant, waiting hopefully. (Infuriated by my silence and probably my lack thereof on previous days.) "What's the matter, eh? She write you out of her will for being a slimy little bastard?" 

"Ron." Granger tugs at his sleeve and there's Potter, hovering at his shoulder. "Leave it, will you?" 

Too late. "Weasley, your family doesn't even have a will, there's nothing left to give away." Lame. What, had all my insults wilted with the flowers on her windowsill? Once a vivid canary yellow, they had turned brown and drooping, slowly perishing. 

"I hope she dies," he bursts out, not looking remorseful in the least (even when Hermione gasps and drags him away). It takes a moment before I meet the remaining pair of eyes, narrowed at me behind those crooked glasses. Tousled hair and ebony gaze as starkly black as his robes, near white complexion…is that how it goes, Potter? Black and white, solid lines? (Her skin was tinged gray, and the sharply etched lines of pain blurred in my stinging vision.) 

"Er - don't mind Ron. He didn't mean it." 

Crumpled parchment sweaty between my fingers. Face suddenly burning. There are no words, no flippant insults that- 

"He's still mad about what you, er - what happened last week, which - well-" 

Don't know how to be nice to a Slytherin, do you, Potter? Well, it won't stop you from trying. A pity, that. The look on his face is the hesitant concern of the Muggle nurses, scurrying through the halls with their too-white uniforms and clutched clipboards. They always stopped me, put a motherly hand on my shoulder, asked if I was all right. Most gave up when I shook them off and growled to be left alone. 

The lack of response is frustrating him, as it had Ron. Conversation, like many things (marriage, for example), takes two people. My life seems littered with the failures of such. 

"Er - how _is_ she?" He still seems conflicted between the gloating look Ron had worn and a sympathetic worry, eventually choosing a concerned middle ground. 

"Oh, doing quite well." It's amazing the traces of sarcasm that are never picked up on, though fully meant. "That is to say, safe and warm six feet under." 

The confusion is only augmented, flickering across his features like a breeze shivers in ripples over the glassy surface of a puddle. A solitary drop and the calm is disturbed. After she died, I had gone to the window, expecting a stormy night or at least rain - any bit of rain. (Teardrops I could not shed.) But the skies had been untainted, undisturbed. It was not until I returned to Hogwarts that the storm had arrived, and by that time the burning behind my eyes had subsided. 

"I'm sorry…Draco," he finally manages. "Ron - I - we didn't realize." 

Sincere people make me sick. Because their sincerity is sickly sweet: are flowers and magically conjured fruit baskets to chase away the grief you aren't supposed to feel? A pat on the back from the kindly doctor and he moves on to a new medical file. Dealings with him are over; time to call the morgue instead. (Goodbye, Mother - I'll remember you when I eat off your china, when I walk past your portraits, when I ask Father not to kill your friends -) 

Life is cold. Can't people accept that? 

Potter is clearly having a difficult time with my awkward silences. "Um. If there's anything I can do, you know, uh - I've been there, it's -" 

"You can go away, for a start." I offer him a sardonic grin. "Oh, and you can kick Weasley for me. That would be a real favor, yeah, thanks." 

He stares at me, blankly, face still shifting between pity and the routine abhorrence. (Too hard to place for you, Potter. Color me black; make me into a child's sketched figure with reaching spider hands like the empty tree branches, maybe even with a villain's leer. Then your world can be checkerboard balanced again.) "Oh - whatever. Malfoy." It is nothing but a muttered curse, and he stalks away. 

At last solitude comes, though if I strain I can hear Ron still yelling expressively outside. His voice carries with the dry leaves, scattering over the streets of Hogsmeade. At the table near the window, Professor Sprout frowns as she reviews a paper with Professor McGonagall and shakes her head into the late autumn afternoon. 

I unroll the tiny scroll of parchment, remembering how I tucked it into my pocket that night when her coughing rattled through the tiny hospital room and shook like the angry breeze plucking at the window. Superstitious, she'd grown, at least on her deathbed. Wouldn't anyone? 

_Save your last drops from the shadow. Dragon's blood may save but it also condemns._

Maybe a drink isn't such a bad idea. I shove the parchment back in my pocket, shaking the coins as I do so. They jingle like discordant church bells, chiming a funeral dirge. (There were none.) She was entombed without the watching gaze of my father and I. He was drunk. I was in Potions. We were both, I suppose, too busy to mourn. We still are. 

"Something strong," I request, showing her the flashes of gold. "Please." 

"Aren't you a bit young?" Eyebrow raises. (I had a dog with an expression like that, once. Father made me kill it when he found out.) "How about a Butterbeer?" 

"No. Forget it." 

I turn away. His eyes had been ice when I told him, his posture as rigid as the statues that littered our gardens. Porcelain white but as unyielding as iron. Expressions set in serene smiles, too frozen to mold into any other gaze. He had only smirked, nodding, as if he had expected it. Of course, he had, but he didn't seem to mind. Then again, all statues are hollow inside. They bake easily that way. 

Later, angry, I took one of those statues and smashed it on the garden path. (A million shards, tiny doves falling to the ground.) 

It gave me little satisfaction. 

_He is your son, Lucius._

He was not home that night or the next. The third, I returned to school; I heard later that he entertained friends. The house elves cooked an extra splendid dinner. It's a shame to have missed it. (Not really.) 

Absently, I wonder who these friends were. Death Eaters, perhaps, offering their condolences - or congratulations? Or they could have been my mother's pretended friends, offering their sugary sympathy molded into flowers and fruit baskets, smug smiles that conceal the fangs and greedy tastebuds beneath. (Power never satiates.) 

Maybe he'll find one to sleep with. But then, he lusts only for power, and that is a mistress that is never content. 

As they say, the apple never falls far from the tree. Is that the life I look forward to, the two-dimensional picture I will reenact? They often talk of a brick wall that is only painted to look like an endless stretch of road. Will I be the fool to blunder into it? (Brains spread across the pavement like a forgotten piece of roadkill.) Fool? Or suicidal wise man? 

Maybe the question isn't if the apple always falls beside the tree, but if it still would fall were Newton not there to observe? I cannot offer an answer, but I know someone who knows. 

She is dead, and her voice whispers to me in dreams. 

_He is your son…_

And her dying breath wasted on a Muggle nurse she deluded herself into thinking her husband. Stupid, stupid, stupid! 

A shadow falls across my table, cool and refreshingly oppressive at the same moment. I do not have to glance up; something in me predicted his return. Maybe her ghost grants me some power of divination. Or maybe I just know him too well; know him from furtive glances in Potions, know him from trying too hard to hate, know him from knowing myself. 

"Now what?" 

"I did it," he says, voice as cool as his shadow. He truly is black and white, a faded photograph the masses still cling to as their hero. Two dimensional, of course. Perhaps, I think, everything is nowadays. 

"Did what, Potter?" Do I care? That, probably, should have been the question. Still, the hesitantly proud expression flitting over his features made me wonder. 

"I - I kicked Weasley - I mean, Ron," he answers, grinning as he sees my surprise. (Startled, for once, into true emotion.) Before I can protest, he catches the chair with his foot and slides into it with the ease of a predator, dark emeralds watching me. 

"What, did he _feel_ it?" 

"Er. Probably?" Potter's grin turns sheepish. "He's being an ass about it all, though, really." 

"And this is your business because?" 

"I - I just -" 

Words fail, once again. They usually do. A picture is worth a thousand words, a feeling worth a thousand pictures, and what becomes of all those unexpressed feelings? I can feel them breaking inside like the waves of the ocean on the slippery rocks. (Barnacles of littered memories and tiny tidepool sanctuaries lingering hopelessly on the surface.) 

The remnants of his grin make me want to reach over and slap him. So meaninglessly smug. Tousled hair, lanky limbs, skin like porcelain, ocean gaze that swallows you. And that damn scar, mocking me. 

It occurs to me how ugly the human body is. (You appreciate that, don't you, Mother? You, who spent the last days of your life trying to cover the decay. Fake.) There are lines crisscrossing over even the smoothest flower-petal skin. I can look at anyone now and imagine him on his deathbed: skin sagging and spotted, sallow and transparent. (So much excess clothing. I would long to rip it off, dispose of the repulsive blood and bile building inside, and fly free. Whisper of smoke and then nothing.) 

And he's looking at me. Grin faded, now, just puzzlement returning to spread its foolish wings across his features. 

"What?" I snap. 

He shrugs - a nonchalant little toss of his shoulder. I watch the robe flutter and think that, at the same time, everything must be as beautiful as it is ugly. The shadows, the light, the black and white and yes, yes, Potter, the gray. 

"Nothing. Just wondering what you're thinking." 

"Will you give me a Galleon if I tell you?" 

He laughs, albeit reluctantly, at my sarcastic retort. I frown. To make him laugh was certainly not the intent. "Like you need more money, Malfoy. All right." A gold piece is shoved across the table. "Galleon for your thoughts, then." 

"I seem to have expensive thoughts." He grins, again, and I frown more deeply. What is his problem? The point was never to get along. 

"So? I paid you." 

This conjures another idea and I have to chuckle, softly. He raises an eyebrow, quizzically, and his expression is almost comical. (That's you, Potter. Their hope, their laughter, their joy. Their hero. What am I, the quintessential archenemy? Or do I not even deserve that title, instead relegated to the list of Slytherin nemeses after Voldemort?) 

I don't particularly enjoy being second to the Dark Lord, no matter how terrible the Wizarding world may perceive him to be. 

_He is your son, Lucius._

"So?" Potter persists. I shrug. 

"I was thinking how idiotic you are. Basically." I wave the girl back over and ask for a Butterbeer with the Galleon. She raises a questioning eyebrow at Potter and he nods also, giving her a handful of smaller coins. 

Instead of flinging an insult back, he only shrugs. "I guess I was, giving you that Galleon and all. But I was wondering. I mean, I never knew my parents, so - it hurt a lot, but probably in a different way. You knew your mother. It had to-" 

"Shut up, Potter." My voice isn't necessarily raised, but it slides from my lips much harder than I expected. 

He stares at me for a moment, then only nods. "Yeah, what was I thinking? Trying to talk to the impenetrable wall here. Do you even _have_ a heart somewhere in there?" 

"Of course not," I reply. "Children of Death Eaters are born without hearts. Didn't you know that? Oh, I forgot, you grew up in the Muggle world." 

We both sit quietly for a minute as I watch his face screw up. "You're - you're joking, right?" he finally resigns himself into asking. 

I can't help the laughter that bubbles at his hesitant doubt. "The look…on your face…" When she returns with our drinks, I am still smirking at him. Taking a sip, I shake my head. "How dumb can you get, Potter? The heart is generally an organ necessary for life, you know." 

"I - I know that! You just looked so serious." 

I roll my eyes. "I can't believe you actually thought-" 

"Oh, shut up! Who knows what weird rituals you go through." 

Silence seeps, melted glass glowing amber in the setting sun of the afternoon. (What baubles will we form today with the tongs of our angry teeth and the silence we play catch with?) I watch him, the constant shift in that verdant gaze, and frown. "What did you just say?" 

He is now uncomfortable; I can see it in his eyes and the way his elbows jut. I can see it in the way he pushes his chin forward - challenging, stubborn. "I said," he says, "who knows what weird rituals you go through." 

I drink, letting that bottled sunlight slip through my compulsively clenched teeth. A drop lingers on my lip and I conscientiously wipe it away. "Don't call me," I tell him, cold as February mornings, "one of them. Ever." 

_Please, Lucius. Listen to me. _The Muggle nurse looked to me, helpless, shrugging. _I know you never thought of me as much at all, but I'm dying, and please -_

_Spare him. Please.___

_He is your son…_

My chair scrapes, a shade louder than the leaves have, over the floorboards. He watches me and I hate knowing that, hate seeing his perplexed gaze on me. He hates mysteries, I know, and that is what I've become. No, not the word - he doesn't hate. Hate is apathetic, hate is blind, and before was hate. 

Now is puzzlement, and it frightens me. It frightens me because I thought I knew him inside and out, simple, and he was predictable. (I hate surprises.) I suppose I don't know him well enough, because I don't know what comes next. 

He catches my wrist as I brush past him. He looks up at me, dark eyes trying to silently work out the puzzle. I throw him off. 

"Malfoy-" 

I don't bother with words. What, in the end, do they truly accomplish? 

The door swings shut with a satisfying click and I weave quickly into the crowd, feet passing over the dusty streets and their adornments of frisking leaves. I take one in my hand and crumple it, fingers carefully peeling the dry skin from the veins. I marvel at the flaming red orange of it. I remember its previous greenery. 

I wish I could burn it all. Purgation. 

But how many things can be easily absolved with licking flames and the lonesome soul of the fire spiraling into gray sky oblivion? Or how many spirals of smoke return to haunt the unburned leaves scattering, scraping, through the gutter? 

Late afternoon burns down the back of my robes and the clouds streak like trailing ghosts across the sky. I follow the lonely path back to Hogwarts, noting how most others take the easier ways. I don't mind walking. I don't mind much, anymore. 

The day passes on in silence as the sun trails its burning heat across the sky, blazing like the clusters of leaves below. 

(Sometimes, I think, fire is not enough.) 


	2. winter (ice)

  
Part Two : Ice

  


They call winter an old man, portraying him bent and crooked, fingers curled and scraping against the glazed windowpanes. They show his wrinkles and wispy crown of white, his haggard expression and thin cloak of ragged gray. 

They are all wrong. 

Winter is a woman, temptress with cheeks pale as snow, heart of unmeltable ice. She flirts with her eyes of frosted glass, teasing with her stinging touch and settling around your mind in a haze of ivory. She is the courtesan of a million Galleons, untouchable and unreachable yet everywhere at once. 

(She haunts like a ghost in the fog; gentle breath crystallized diamonds against the dark morning sky.) 

The holidays are spent - in my case - lazing about the common room and imagining scenarios at home. I am glad that I did not return. There would be a stream of women with porcelain skin and painted faces, eyes green with cupidity and lusting after my father. (He alone to wear the crown of winter: strings pulled by those ice-cold hands. Power is a cold comfort at night.) There would be hushed meetings that Father would encourage my participation in, pompous whispers and frightened chuckling in the midnight shadows. 

No, Hogwarts has a better Christmas. Especially if it is to be spent alone. 

The fire has burned itself down to embers, despite the fact that it is still early evening. I eat alone and pass the days alone. It is happier that way. 

Cheek pressed against the cool glass, I stare down at the grounds of Hogwarts. Several students are gallivanting about, snowball fights and rosy cheeks and sugarplum dreams. (Ridiculous to indulge in such hopes.) The group is dominated by fiery hair, blazing against the backdrop of ivory in the winter twilight. And yes, there is Granger, torn from her books, and that Hufflepuff - what was her name? Hannah? 

So why is it that so many have stayed at Hogwarts when all of Slytherin has gone, running home to their power-hungry parents and leaving me in this blessed solitude? Does it matter, truly? 

The two pieces of parchment in my fingers are surprisingly smooth, glossy, and the writing on the first is penned with precision. The second is a great deal sloppier. (Splotches and spidery lines, dominating the page with their reaching tendrils; the curling m's and y's dwarfing the lesser scrawl of a's and i's, the surprised loop of o's. The t's stand rigid guard.) 

_Draco, it is your decision whether or not to return home for the holidays. Answer before the end of the week._

The stark, precise writing and the clipped cursive are a contrast with the second letter's writing, which scrolls on for several pages. It had arrived the same day and I have still not finished reading it. The second paragraph has troubled me quite enough. 

They are making snow angels on the lawn, arms windmilling through the powdery snow. And where, I wonder, is he? I can picture him perfectly, hair pushed back messily from his flushed forehead, eyes burning like neon lights. 

Though the fire has burned to ash, shadows still flicker among the faint glow on the walls. (Reminiscent of fall, the auburn colors and crackling leaves. It has died now, given way to winter's seductive breath and icicle fingers. So the days pass.) 

I hear the door and do not turn, waiting. I know how I must appear, hands pressed against the windowpane as if longing to be closer to that temptress Winter, eyes burning like the frosty glass. And I know, too, how he must appear; his eyes are as frigid green as ever, snow-covered forests and towering pine tree pride. It's strange, but I can smell him from here, that distinct mix of cologne and cinnamon and soap, probably a little sweat, and I am already anticipating the words when they come. 

"Malfoy." 

So it is that I am not surprised when I turn to face those tousled curls, the pale pink of dawn creeping across his cheeks. He is breathing hard. (Rising, falling, rising again. I watch the rhythm of his chest, hear his breath heavy on the air.) He must have run. Why? 

"Why are you here, Potter? Who let you in?" 

"Goyle." He shrugs, a careless movement, a languid toss of his shoulder that leaves me contemplating how like a predator he is. Only too obvious. "I had to talk to you." 

I remember the parchment rough between the pads of my fingers and look down at the messy script. Yes, he would, wouldn't he? 

In a flash I have him pinned against the door he has just shut, staring into those dizzying pools of confusion and sudden rage. "First of all, you never come to a Slytherin place. And second-" waving the parchment like some sort of ridiculous battle flag, fingers gripping the damp fabric of his shirt- "why the _hell _have you been going to _my _mother's grave?" 

"Let go of me." 

The thing I hate about Potter the most - besides the smirks, the popularity, the effortless perfection, and everything else - has to be his ability to always surprise me. (I have him narrowed down to those perfect lines of black and white, as he does me, and then he does something _colorful_.) I think I have him figured out, think I know what to expect. And then I realize I have no idea. 

I release him, reluctantly, and he shoves me away. It is then that I notice the other scent, the sweet fragrance like my mother's gardenias. Frown. (Color, again. Shades of gray. I like the austere beauty of simplicity, like having him no more than lines.) 

"You were with a girl," I say. 

He looks up at me and, from the wry grin that slips across his face, it seems I never fail to surprise him either. (A coloring contest. Only backwards. Look, Potter, we are children again.) "Yeah," Potter shrugs. "So? I thought we were talking about your mother." 

"We were. We were talking about how you have no right to be curious about her. Stay the hell away from her grave." 

He cocks his head, curious as ever. Perhaps he isn't a predator but a great silly dog, a - no, a cat, languid and effortlessly graceful but curious, playful - 

(Curiosity killed the cat, Potter. Don't play with fire and don't play with Winter, both will burn you.) 

"How'd you find out, anyway?" he wonders. "You've never been there, I know that much." 

"Family friend," I finally concede, after considering whether or not to brush the question off. "He wrote me." A wave of that tattered battle flag, the writing sprawling spidery in lines of a general's worst nightmare. "A lot." 

"Well I figure," Potter continues, hardly acknowledging my explanation, "that you never go there, and your dad never goes there, no one does, really. So why shouldn't I? And I was curious." 

"What, d'you get a lot of questions answered from talking to her tombstone?" 

"It's a feeling," he snaps. "Surrounded by the dead, there. And it's like a connection. You wouldn't know, of course; you've never been there." 

I watch the way his jaw moves when he talks and the way his eyes squint. He is glaring at me and it makes me want to laugh. I wish I could simplify him into cartoon lines, a curve of the chin and a bit of a line for the nose, a bit of a dip just below his mouth. (Shadows haunt, there around his jaw, and cluster about his lips.) And his cheekbones, jutting from the translucent skin, ivory clear. Icy. (Flush of color there, and the eyes-) 

No. There is no reducing him to mindless simplicity. Not anymore. He is watching me guardedly in return and I know that he is attempting the same. 

For once, we both fail at something, and neither has tried to win. 

"I was curious," he repeats. "You confuse me, D - Malfoy." 

That ends it, that there, the fact that he was just about to say my name. I don't relish the thought of my name slipping through those lips, hovering on that tongue. Potter doesn't deserve it. 

"Run back to your little friends," I say curtly. "Go on, back to Granger or Patil or whoever you were busy with before you decided to bother with me." 

"It's Ginny," he responds without thinking, shadows parting as he grins. He does not seem to realize to whom he is talking. "I needed an excuse to get away. So I came to see you." 

"I don't want to be your excuse," I say, yanking open the door. The shadows spill into the stairway and he shrugs, stepping out of my line of sight. (I don't want to be your excuse, Potter; I don't want to be your reason. I don't want to be your enigma to puzzle over. I don't want to be your anything.) 

I slam the door and gain little satisfaction from it. Pacing restlessly across the floor, I crouch before the fire and stare into the sparks still glowing like demon eyes in the shadows. I reach out and poke the ashes. 

"Ow! Damn! That's hot!" Sucking my finger ruefully, I wonder why I did it. "Fire is hot, Draco. Really? What a surprise." Maybe I want to feel, want to shake off the frostbite of Winter's presumptuous kisses. Her pale lipstick, a smear of frost on my cheek, shimmering. (Numbing.) 

Tomorrow is Christmas. On the lawn, they begin a snowball fight, pelting the arriving Harry with snow and laughter and - from one redhead girl, at least - kisses. I snort and turn away. 

Still, Christmas away from home is probably the best decision I've made in a long time. 

He always used to frown when I was dissatisfied. I got my first broom at the age of three and the endless pouring in of flying paraphernalia never stopped. And the lines in his face were as imposing as any Quidditch player's smiling face staring me down from yet another poster. My first broom at three and the next day I was being forced on by his frown. I fell off. 

I hate flying. 

No, it's not that I hate it. Only that I don't enjoy it. I never wanted to go flying and threw fits when he forced me to try. All through childhood I avoided it and enjoyed Quidditch because I was supposed to enjoy it. Cheering from the sidelines. Adoring some brainless but muscle-bound Chaser. He made me fly and so I did, though I found no joy in it. And every Christmas I got a new broom, shiny and new. (He tried so hard.) 

I still disliked flying, still preferred reading or chess or something more practical. Then I saw Potter fly. 

(Hair blowing feathery on the breeze, robes billowing, eyes glowing with delight. He was some sort of graceful exotic bird, plumage spread and gaze intense. Swooping on the wind with head thrown back, eyes to the sky and that tiny glowing ball, the miniature sun hovering like terrified prey beside him.) He confused me with his effortless ease, the equilibrium, that elusive joy shining on his face. He disgusted me, maybe, finding happiness in so simplistic an endeavor. Yet- 

He made me want to fly. 

I was home for the holidays and received the traditional broom, wrapped in austere tissue at the bottom of my bed. ("Go on, try it," he had urged, actual interest in his voice. "There's a new type of handle from the-") I had ignored him, mostly. But I had gone. 

It's not that I hate flying. It's that I don't derive any pleasure from it. Broomsticks, in my opinion, are not the choice method of travel. Not only are they uncomfortable and awkward, they expose you to wind and all sorts of unpleasant weather. And weaving through the air on a stick isn't my favorite past time. 

There I was, soaring above the clouds, wondering if my father was watching, feeling utterly stupid. And I had closed my eyes (I can fly a broom blindfolded, so well do I know it) and imagined the clouds of another field, imagined soaring without parental inhibitions behind me. 

And I felt something joyful bubble like springtime, something reminiscent of childhood glee (had I any, which I did not) and eyes of green ice dusted with spring glory. 

I was flying. 

And later, touching down on the snow covered fields, I felt the wind burn against my cheeks and I felt ashamed. There was an intangible joy that had shrouded me up there, blue skies and clear air. I wasn't Draco Malfoy. I wasn't anyone. I was just soaring, mindless, free. 

I swore to everything that I pretended to believe in that it would never happen again. That uninhibited glory, that feeling, frightened me. Too wild. Too free. 

Too reminiscent of Potter. 

I know I don't look natural on a broomstick. I know I concentrate too much, fight the feeling; I know that I purposely avoid any sort of daredevil trick, because it might come with some adrenaline rush. But it's better than that feeling, isn't it? That letting go, that freedom. (I am not he of the raven feather hair and the midnight forest eyes. I don't fly.) 

I glance down at the parchment in my fingers. _That cursed Potter boy visits her grave nearly every week_, the spidery script tells me. _Just stands there, staring, sometimes he traces the letters on her grave._

It makes me sick, thinking of him standing forlornly in the winter evenings. Truthfully, it would make me more comfortable were it my father there, or anyone else. Anyone but Potter. Of course, that isn't possible, is it? 

_Your father never visits. But quite possibly that won't surprise you._

Nothing surprises me, anymore. 

_I don't know what the kid thinks he's doing. Yesterday he was there for a full two hours, just watching. I thought you would want to know. Your father tells me you two have quite the rivalry going, Draco. But I'm not surprised. Still…_

I hated his ellipses, the way he trailed off in the middle of sentences as if I was supposed to pick up. I remembered the way my mother treasured his letters. She loved his half-sentences and his messy writing; she would read them again and again, delicate fingers shuffling the pages that smelled like her perfume after many re-readings. She loved to keep them, would fold and unfold them over again until the fine paper creased. 

But I am not my mother. 

_Still…_ Still what? 

I hate surprises, I hate unknowns, and I hate Potter. 

It occurs to me that I hate a lot of things. (But what do I hate the most?) 

I would want to keep him, I think, put him away in a crystal cage where his voice could echo lonesome from the walls. Singing one word, one thing, one name - my name. Still, he would slam one day against those shimmering bars and all his blood (Gryffindor crimson) would seep out in lightning bolt wounds. He fears captivity as much as I fear freedom: he because he has known it too long, I because I have never tasted it. 

I think that, deep down; we all belong to someone else. But I know, too, that he will never be mine. 

This doesn't bother me as much as you might expect. It isn't that I want him to be mine. And I know I don't want to be his. But I want something, something besides icy fingers on my skin and her frigid breath on my cheek. Something besides the façade that Winter allows me. 

Still, I know he is too distant. He doesn't belong in a cage. He doesn't belong on Winter's leash. 

And that, well, that is good. I prefer him riding above those glittering hills of diamond flecks, hair streaming in the winter air. I prefer him flying. 

It means there is still something to watch the skies for, when the stars aren't enough. 


	3. spring (lion)

So I should be finishing the second to last chapter to Untouchable Face, right? And I was all set to do so, when I find that ShinigamiForever and Canarde reviewed my measly little fic. And I was so flattered that I had to continue. So there; blame my awe of others for my lack of dealing with Gil's fate. Again, for the wondrous Christy, who keeps me [in]sane.   


Part Three : Lion

  


The windows of the classroom rattle and I glance towards them, wondering why March is such a contradiction. It just so happens that my line of vision runs right into Potter and I frown, arms crossed. At least he is across the room. At least he isn't aware of my gaze. At least he isn't next to me, taunting me with that smirk and that slight dusting of hair down the back of his neck. 

But he is in my thoughts, and that is enough to ruin the entire period. 

It seems ironic we must endure History of Magic with them, struggling through Binns' tireless tirades of history. Most are asleep. Some are daydreaming; others gaze about the room. Only that Muggle Granger seems to be listening. 

Thankfully, Potter seems lost in his own world. 

(Emerald city and dusky sky as soft as flower petals. You're flying, aren't you, Potter? Lost in that realm of smoky dreaming.) 

But I was thinking about March. Not about Potter. The way March is first a lion and then a lamb, roaring its defiance to the sky and then whispering zephyr sweetness in lilac lullabies. Only it never does. That is the romanticized spring, and the spring I see is angry. (A ghost of Winter, her elder brother, staggering and blowing fit to knock down brick houses. What about porcelain statues, o Spring of tempestuous breath? Can you huff and puff and blow my father down?) 

An oxymoron, March is. Ambivalent. Beloved hatred, light darkness, extinguishable life flame. It is black and white all at once and I do not like the gray it merges into. (Ashen gray squares and turbulent marble; no chess game can be built on such shades.) 

So March is a lion. Which makes March a Gryffindor, which I can certainly see. Blustering and self-righteous, stinging and pompous and proud all at the same time. Does he like March, I wonder? But I don't have to wonder. March is a month for dreamers and those forgotten; a harbor of buffeting storms that nevertheless leaves you feeling cleansed of Winter's contaminating touch. 

Potter is too straightforward to be a true dreamer. Still, he has grandiose schemes. And he lives in his own mind of regrets and castles of air. But he remains an enigma to me, a face that taunts me with its ever-changing, unreadable expressions. And his writing is that of a four year old - this coming from one who was forced into precise penmanship, but nevertheless. 

_Meet me outside Hogwarts after History._

There is no name, but I would recognize that scribbling anywhere. And I probably shouldn't want to go, but he is enough of a mystery to tempt me. So when the bell shakes us all from our respective reveries and sends us scattering through the halls, I find my way into March's trembling embrace. (Limbs of entangling silk with early buds on the branches and angry voice in my ears. Where is he?) 

Just when I think it's a ploy to make me look stupid, I see that familiar figure loping across the grounds towards me. (He is wolflike today, graceful gait carrying him to my side.) 

"Where the h-" I begin, when he launches a tirade of his own. 

"Where's your broom?" he demands, staring at me as if I've grown a tail and two horns. (What am I now, the Devil?) 

"Am I not allowed to walk anymore?" 

"I _told_ you we were going somewhere," he snaps, teeth gritted. 

I pull the parchment from my pocket, smirk glittering on my face like some hideous mask. "Yeah? Did you write it in invisible ink?" I hand it to him, the one line, and watch those cold gems of eyes scan the words. 

"It was_ implied_," he growls. "Anyway, we can stop by the locker rooms, they should have an extra one." The wind rushes around us, shrieking through the gray afternoon. "Well?" he demands with one leg over his broomstick. "Are you going to get on or what?" 

"With you? I'll pass, Potter." 

"Malfoy," he says patiently, "get your bloody ass on this broom." 

"Or what? Why should I?" 

I don't resist when he grabs my wrist and yanks me on, though I have good reason to. "This broom is not made for two," I grumble as we leave the ground behind. I cling tightly to the handle, unable to stop my knees from squeezing his sides to stay on. "And it is not the right weather for flying! What the hell are you thinking?" 

He doesn't answer, probably concentrating on maneuvering through the clutches of springtime gales. We lurch forward and I find myself with my face buried in his shoulder. (Cinnamon and lilies, the faint tang of regulation Hogwarts soap. If I close my eyes, I can focus on that singular fragrance-) If it is possible to lean further off a broomstick, I do not realize. It's a relief to land beside the squat building near the Quidditch field. 

"You do realize," he teases, grinning, "that rumors will fly if anyone saw us?" 

"That isn't funny." I shoulder past him and into the building, retrieving one of the school brooms. It isn't in the best condition, but I hardly expected more. He is waiting impatiently when I come out and kicks off before I can even mount, hovering above me like some angel-harbinger of death. 

"Are you coming?" he shouts over the wind as I rise beside him. I roll my eyes. 

"Where are we going?" I call back, but he is already speeding ahead. Cursing the old broom, I rush to catch up. The wind whistles by, robbing my limbs of all lingering body warmth. "You know," I try again, "we could get expelled for this. Not supposed to leave school grounds." 

"Ha. You fly well," he yells back to me across the chasm of air between us, ignoring my words. "But so unnaturally. Too precise. Don't you feel it?" 

"Whatever, Potter," I shout, unwilling to argue. 

"I'm serious, all right? The wind in your ears, the open skies - the freedom! Can't you see? It's glorious!" 

"I can't hear you." I pantomime his voice not reaching my ears, not wanting to acknowledge his words. Without warning he comes swerving towards me, almost knocking me off as he goes shooting past. "Potter! Get the hell away; what do you think you're doing? We could've crashed!" 

He grins mischievously. "Nah, I have faith in my flying abilities." Reaching out to grab my sleeve, he adds, "Tag, you're It." 

I stare at him, nonplussed. "What?" 

"Oh, for God's sakes - it's a Muggle game. Someone tags you and you're It. When you catch someone else, they're It." 

"Simple games for simple people? How juveni-" 

"It's a kid's game!" 

"Yet you still pl-" 

"It was a joke, Malfoy." 

"Whatever." 

"Shut up." 

"Sod off." 

"Fuck you." 

"Muggle lover." 

"Asshole." 

Needless to say, we ride the rest of the way in silence. I am almost afraid to break the glasslike stillness of the air between us, but when I see where we were landing I cannot help it. 

"I can't believe you! You have _no right_ to bring me here!" 

He swoops towards the ground and I have an itching urge to fly off without him, to never let my feet touch that cursed ground. I don't want to see. I don't want to know. He's doing me no favors by bringing me here; he'd better know that - 

"Coming?" And I find myself landing beside him amongst those stark markers of stone, gazing about me. 

He takes my wrist before I can resist and I somehow don't have the heart to shake off that hesitant touch. Petal smooth and cool as March sky, treating me like fragile porcelain. I want to tell him that I'm not made of glass, but I can't. (Under his touch, maybe I am.) "We don't have to go there," he says carefully to me, as if speaking to a small child. "That isn't why I brought you, actually. Look. Malfoy, over here." 

I follow his gaze to the tiny headstone, eyes tracing over the letters. "Lily and James Potter," I read aloud over the breeze. "Together in life, together in death." I feel the mockery spring to my lips but his shoulders quake and I watch, surprised, as he sinks to his knees. 

"No one remembers them," he forces out between muffled sobs. Who is glass now? His grasp slips off my wrist. I have never heard his voice like that, choked with emotion. "You know that? You know? After all the ceremonies and tears and speeches, look what's left! No one even comes here anymore!" 

I crouch beside him, jeans swiftly dampening at the knees. "Are you crying, Potter?" It is not a malicious question, only a curious one. 

He moves to wipe his eyes and smudges a bit of dust across his cheek, soon turned to muddy tears. He stares at me through the watery lenses of his crooked glasses, chin set. "No." 

Unable to resist, I reach one finger to wipe a tear from his cheek. He watches me; blinking droplets from his eyes, and we both stay crouched like that in the mud for a long, long moment. Waiting. "You are crying, Potter." 

He stands. "I have," he retorts, "allergies." 

"All these flowering trees," I concede, glancing about at the bare branches reaching like skeletons to the dusky curtain above (skeletons with their flesh robbed by the nimble fingers of Winter, tendrils of ice clinging to their stark limbs). Perhaps Spring has not yet come - the Spring we have come to expect, anyway. "Why did you bring me here, Potter?" 

His eyes are red-rimmed but still that glowing green and full of light, fixed upon me. "I wanted you to see. I-" 

"Did you bring Weasley here? Granger?" 

He looks away now, gaze flickering through the cold cemetery. "Maybe someday. Not today." I don't answer, don't have one. I'm not sure if I want to see, but I ask anyway. 

"Where is she?" 

He doesn't look at me, but his voice is soft. "Not too far. Over here." I follow him down the path; both of our robes are gathering dust at the hems. I recognize it several rows away, the towering memorial of marble. (Spend your money, Father, not your time.) 

"That's-" 

I stop him. "I know." There are petals scattering the frozen grass, torn remnants of a mourning crowd that then separated to drink tea and bicker over her jewelry. I pick up one discarded flower and absently tear at its mottled petals. _Narcissa Malfoy_. No delicate saying, no _together in death_, nothing of the sort. There are only cold marble angels with their wings anchored to the ground, their stone faces serenely aloof. "You - you come here a lot?" 

He shrugs effortlessly, eyes like frozen jungles fixed upon the monument - as are mine. "I guess. Why don't you? Don't you miss her?" 

There is something of a truce here, a different feeling. The ridiculous mockery doesn't come as easily to my lips and he does not stare at me with the routine antipathy. Something tells me that here, among all these quietly forgotten stones, we are but the same color. (No black, no white, only cold gray marble that stays solid against March's breath.) I look at him silently until he meets my gaze. "I don't know how to," I say honestly, feeling the wind sweep across my skin. "I don't know. Maybe. Do _you_?" 

He looks away, his fingers curling about the handle of his broom. "Yeah. Yeah, I do. All the time." 

I would tease him, I suppose, only I don't know what he would do. I don't know what to expect. So I simply gaze at my feet and the scattered roses and the frosted ground. (March must snore when he sleeps, I think; always rumbling, always restless.) 

"We should go," Potter tells me quietly, and with a glance at my watch I know he is right. By the time we return, dinner will be over. I expect no questions from Crabbe or Goyle, though Pansy might send me a few curious looks. I'm sure he will meet with plenty from his companions. I'm just as sure that he'll lie. 

"Don't tell," I say, not entirely sure why. 

"I'm not going to." He climbs, almost reluctantly, onto his broomstick. "Er. Will you be coming back?" 

I climb on my own broomstick, feeling the worn handle beneath my fingers. I think about him flying, the grace, think about my own inadequacy on such a means of transportation. For a moment he isn't Potter, he isn't someone that I have to hate. He's someone I can probably wonder about, be curious about. Maybe I can even be impressed with his flying. 

But I blink, or the wind shifts, and the moment is gone. 

"No." We kick off the ground at the same time and are buoyed by the fingers of air, lifted to the sky in all its ashen glory. "It's out of the way." 

He is flying closer than before, both of us bobbing through the air side by side. I can see him frown. "You could come with me, if you want," he offers. His voice is raw in the blustering wind. "I didn't find my parents' until the last time I came. I'll be coming back, 'cause of that, I guess." 

"No." 

"Even if-" 

"_No_, Potter!" 

Maybe he realizes he's pushed me too far. Maybe he recognizes the tone in my voice. (You aren't supposed to know me. You aren't supposed to recognize the voice inflections, the shift in my expressions, the rigidity in my flying. You shouldn't. So why do you?) In any case, he shuts up. 

The land below is thawing slowly, the last droplets of Winter slowly soaking away. It's only visible from the sky, but here and there are stretches of soon-to-be-flowering trees and patches of muddy grass. Were we walking, the March afternoon would look the same as February or January, but I suppose we know better from up here. Things look different. 

Hogwarts, too, looks strangely new from our higher perspective. It looks more like the fortress, the shelter it is, rather than some sprawling castle full of oddities and ridiculous wastes of time. I almost look at it as - 

No, but that's not right. Home isn't something I should be familiar and warm towards; home is a cold house filled with porcelain statues and magic plastic flowers that never wilt. Home is where my father reigns on the throne built with the power of our family tree; home is a place even a warm fire cannot heat. 

"You try to keep so controlled," he says, almost conversationally, and I am startled out of my trance. "Is it that hard to let go?" 

"What are you talking about, Potter?" I snap in reply. 

"Flying. I mean, stop being so stiff." He raises an eyebrow at me. "You aren't your father, you know." 

Something flares defiantly and I scowl back at him, voice carried all too clearly by the wind. "I know that. Of course I know that." And, of course, I would. "I don't need you telling me how to fly, either. I've been on a broom since I was two." Pointedly, "Longer than you." 

He shrugs, refusing the bait. "You fly too awkwardly." 

I let my feet stop on the frozen ground and dismount, hoisting the broom at my side. He does the same, following me. "If I wanted flying lessons, Potter, I wouldn't be asking you." When he doesn't reply, I just turn towards the broom closet and shove the borrowed broomstick back into the shadowy interior. There is a clatter, and I don't much care. "Yes, Potter, our little field trip is over. You can run back to your own tower now." 

He still persists in tagging along at my side as I stride back to the castle, his broomstick swooping perilously near to dragging in the grass if he isn't careful. "We missed supper," he says, toe prodding in the dust as he watches me squeak open the main doors. "You want to come to the kitchens?" 

I glance back at him, one foot on the dusty marble of the main hall and one still poised on the doorstep of the frigid spring afternoon. Or is it early evening? Either way, the shadows flicker about his face and his half-smile and maybe I am tempted to say yes. (Trading laughter by the fire, eating as many pasties as the elves can possibly con us into eating, maybe forgetting and slipping into that gray area where he isn't himself and I am not me and we are both just two sitting and laughing and merging into blissful gray where lines don't exist and black and white is a prejudice we've long since rejected-) 

"Yeah, right, Potter. Run along to your _own_ friends." 

And we part ways in the shadowy corridor, one first-year student scurrying by and granting us a curious look as she nearly drops all of her books. He doesn't quite look at me and I don't quite look at him; neither of us says goodbye. 

_Thanks._

But I don't think I can say it; I don't think I can admit that much to him. Nevertheless, I stand and watch him walk away before I slip through the back passageways to the Slytherin tower. 

Outside the wind whistles and rattles at the windows, branches rising against the backdrop of shadows like a warning finger. (A beckoning finger?) I feel empty like a lonely house with blowing curtains and dusty rooms, haunted by a ghost of smoke and frigid breath, a soul that drifts like an occupant through my frame but never make a home there. It is chilling to realize that you are nothing but blood and bones and bile, an abandoned house that no one can stand to live in. (The rent, I hear, is quite cheap.) Still, I have no home. No home but my father's, which is naught but an ice castle. Still hiding from the grip of Spring in the sanctuary of Winter's breath. 

March is a Gryffindor, but I love him anyway. 


	4. summer (paint)

  
Part Four : Paint

  


Do you ever have the urge to create something beautiful? 

That's summer. Someone - some master - wanted to create something so glorious and lazily utopian that he sat down and dreamt of summer. And he painted it with his palette of prismatic paints, illustrating the haven that everyone dreams at least once of. He gave it life and breath like his own Galatea, each stroke of his brush like a prayer on the canvas of the world. 

_Ding-dong._

The thing I love most about summer is the sky, the early morning dawn shimmering over the horizon in a blaze of heat. I love how the smoky clouds shiver across dawn's pale vanilla skin; lazy ringlets of cigarette smoke from petal pink lips. (Summer romanticizes everything.) 

I can remember seeing those endless horizons reflected in those eyes of darkened evergreen. And I hate it. They are supposed to be bottomless whirlpools, swallowing you to oblivion. 

I hate _him_. 

But I still wonder. And that's probably why I'm standing on his doorstep, finger pressing the doorbell again and again. 

The door opens and he comes yawning into the light, hair tousled and feet bare. I can see his tan line hovering between the ends of his boxers and the curve of his knees. (Still, he is midnight and summer bronze and liquid emerald fire, a peacock's glorified plumage. Living proof that he is no longer black and white to me.) His shirt is wrinkled, small and stretched and slept in. 

"_Malfoy_?" 

I cross my arms. "Hello, Potter." 

"Y - what the hell are you doing here?" 

Looking at him, I think that summer is surely a masterpiece, a mural that stretches and fits snugly like canvas over the surface of the world. Someone had to paint the azure-and-cream skies, the blazing flower petals as if trying out a new feeling of joy with a new palette of rainbow hues; someone must have dreamt of this variegated world and created it thusly. 

A gilded dream, perhaps, but nevertheless. On the surface, it is there; when you are a painter, that is all that matters. 

My words, when they come, seem forcedly casual. They probably are. I shrug a bit, the corner of my mouth twitching. "I needed help." 

It's odd how I see the world in impressionist swirls, yet he sticks out like a three dimensional real life true to form realistic - It's something about him, I think. No, not the coffee skin or the light shining from those beryl orbs or the way his eyes darken and lighten with his mood; not the ridiculous expressions I find him in at the most random times, nor the way his hair slips like shadows across his forehead. I can't put my finger on it, but - 

Somewhere in the painting of the world, he shines. 

"You hate me," he says flatly. 

"Yes." 

"I hate you." 

"Yes." 

"Yet you came to me." 

"Yes." 

"But-" 

"For God's sakes, Potter, shut up and let me in." I shoulder past him into the cool and shadowed home, glancing about me at the living room and wondering briefly if he is as much of a stranger here as I am in my home. If he is as forgotten and as isolated as I, both gathering dust as we sit and dream of - what, exactly? 

"Look," hedges Potter uncomfortably, "my aunt and uncle are out shopping with Dudley. I don't know when they'll be back. If they know you're here-" 

"Fine," I say. "Then we'll talk outside, if it bothers you so much." 

For the first time I notice the concern in his eyes and it makes me want to hit him. "I'm gonna get dressed first," he says, glancing down at my robes. "Can you, uh, change? Please? If anyone says anything to my aunt and uncle, I'll be dead." 

"Too bad," I shrug, "I'm not wearing _your_ clothes. Muggle clot-" 

He grabs my wrist and yanks me with him, scowling. "Fuck you, Malfoy. You came here asking for my help, so don't even pretend that things are the other way around." Ducking into what looks like a crowded closet, he tosses me a pile of clothes and leaves me in the hall. I watch as he shuts the door with a grin. "You better be done when I come out," he yells through the wall, voice muffled. I stare at the bundle of cloth in my arms, lips frozen in an expression of disbelief and hatred. 

I hate him more than I hate my father at this moment, which says a lot. But when he comes out, I'm standing there uncomfortably in his clothes, eyes narrowed. 

"I hate you, Potter." 

"Good." He grins buoyantly and beckons me. "We'll walk around the block or something. I don't know when they'll be back." 

I follow him, watching the way he glides through the shadows. He is wearing dark green and it makes me think of his eyes, those endless depths filled with shadow and light and every possible hue of green in between. (Monochromatic beauty; if I were to live in a one-color world, perhaps it would be such a shade.) His shoulders are wider than mine are and his shirt hangs awkwardly around my slighter frame where it would stretch across his. Only I'm not thinking of that, am I? 

He shuts the door carefully. Before I can stop my curiosity, I wonder aloud, "Why do you stay here, Potter? If you hate them so much?" 

He shifts that enigmatic gaze to me and I see few traces of hatred there, only the same puzzlement that lingers in mine. There should be hatred, shouldn't there? ("Contamination," Father had said curtly, cutting his meat with the same precision with which he performs everything. "Potter fell for it and contaminated the whole bloodline with that Mudblood girl. Poor son's half a Muggle! You learn from that, Draco.") 

"Dumbledore wants me to stay here." 

I snort. "Potter, we've graduated. Yet the old fool still runs your life?" 

He grasps my - his - shirt and yanks me towards him, eyes now snapping with the fury I've come to expect. It's welcome, since I know it and am familiar with it and don't dread it like I dread the uncertainty of his sympathy or curiosity. "Don't ever speak of Dumbledore like that," he growls. "You don't know anything." 

I look away. (Black and white, Potter. Paint the world in black and white. Make me simple like the piano keys and draw your simplistic melody from that. See me in no new summer light.) "Well, still," I shrug quietly, perhaps apologetically, "you have to admit that he's pulling your strings like everybody else." 

Potter doesn't respond and I wonder if I've struck a chord within. Finally he sighs and looks away, turning his attention instead to a stone by the side of the road. He kicks it with ferocity, sending it skittering over the pavement. We walk like that in silence for a time, listening to the wind and the rattle of the pebble and the sound of each other's footsteps. 

"So?" he finally says, arms crossed. The pebble seems forgotten altogether and I pick up where he left off, my kick sending it tumbling ahead of us. 

"So?" I echo, one eyebrow raised. (What game do we play now, darting through our black and white squares?) He doesn't answer, simply waiting. 

If I were a painter I could freeze time and paint him for eternity, trying to capture the burning ferocity of his gaze and the effortless curve of his lips and the way he relaxes when no one is looking like he's letting go of a façade or maybe a burden. I could try to imitate the windblown shadows that streak his caramel silk skin, try to reproduce the sheen of rosepale light that often hovers on his cheeks. (Either way, he will never be captured and bound in the starkness of black and white values, lost to meaningless lines.) 

But I am no painter and he is no angelic vision for my canvas, so I must simply turn away. 

"You know who I am," I tell the pebble, at length. "You know my father. It shouldn't be very surprising that he wants me to be - to be like him." 

He narrows that interrogating gaze at me and I can't help it but to look up and meet his eyes. "What do you mean?" asks Potter carefully. "You don't want to be a Death Eater?" Perceptive, he is. Half a smile moves his lips when he sees me flinch and shake my head almost imperceptibly. "_Say_ it, Malfoy. Let me hear you say that." 

"Why?" The look in his eyes tells me that he is too dangerous to cross in a mood like this. (And how is it that I know and can gauge such mood shifts better than my own?) But then again, I am not in the happiest of moods myself. "I don't want to be my father." 

"You don't want to be Voldemort's little bastard." 

"Same difference," I growl as we catch up to the pebble. His foot snakes in front of mine before I can move and tosses the stone forward. 

"I suppose it is." He's watching me appraisingly and I don't appreciate the guarded concern I feel emanating from him. I don't want it; I don't, actually, know why I am here. Yet I am and it's too late to turn back now, kicking pebbles down the street with him while wearing his clothes. Ironic, isn't it? "So why exactly did you come to me?" Potter asks casually, eyes still upon me. If I didn't know him better (do I?) I might be tempted to think he's reading my mind. 

"Because." Shrug. 

With my eyes focused pointedly on the ground, it isn't surprising that I don't notice he's stopped until he grasps my arm and yanks me back towards him. "Wonderful. Bloody wonderful. You supposedly come to me looking for some sort of help and then all you'll tell me is that you don't want to be your father, which I can basically guess anyway. How do you expect me to help you if-" 

"I don't need your help, Potter. In fact, I don't want it!" 

"Then why the hell did you come knocking on my door in the middle of summer? To take a ruddy walk?" 

"Because…" Because the way he doodles in the middle of History, the way he scratches his nose, the way he chews in puzzlement on his lower lip when he doesn't know the answer; it makes me think he will maybe - he's Potter, of course he will - 

"Yes?" he says, prodding the little rock with his toe. Eventually he pushes it forward, bouncing it along the pavement. (Jumping like a little child - happy, carefree. Was that ever me?) 

"I-" 

Contrary to what I might expect, he seems to gloat in my uncertainty. "You what, Malfoy?" 

I glower at him. "You've already rejected me once," I reply icily, thinking of that voice that pushed me away as refreshingly cool as summer lemonade with ice cubes cracking. "Going to make a habit of it?" 

"You never think about anyone but yourself, do you? It's all about you and your precious reputation. Well you know what? You're taking up _my_ time and _my_ life and-" 

"It's not always about you, either!" I explode. "Forget you're Harry-fucking-Potter for one minute and give someone else a thought! The world isn't your little temple to be worshipped in. Right now you're everyone's favorite sob story, but tomorrow it might be me. Scared of that, eh, Potter?" 

"I'm not a bloody newspaper story," he shouts, eyes blazing and snapping like some sort of magical fire. Avada Kedavra, those eyes. "Seven years and _nobody_ realizes! I'm a _person_!" 

Looking at him, I think that that is what I am most afraid of. I don't want him to be more than the crisp black and white of newspaper words. Even magical pictures are two-dimensional. "I came here because you're the only person I could come to," I say quietly, as a door slides open down the street. We glare in unison at the curious head that pokes out until it withdraws reluctantly. "I - I didn't know where else to-" 

His gaze is surprisingly hard and he raises one eyebrow skeptically. (I have a feeling that lazy Summer is painted in fervent tones of reds and golds and greens. Easily stoked to fury.) "Yeah? Well fuck you, Malfoy. You came to the wrong place." 

He is turning away when I catch his sleeve and meet his eyes solidly. "I went to her grave yesterday." 

This catches his attention and he pauses, frowning ever so slightly. "Your mother's?" 

"My father took me." I watch the light rise and fall in his gaze. "He spat on that monument - you know, that angel - and sneered about the promises she begged him to make. He wasn't there when she died, of course, but he heard." A barely perceptible shrug, bitter. "Never thought he would come to her grave." 

"What did she want him to promise?" 

"To save me. From Voldemort." 

There is a long pause in which I let my hand fall belatedly from his sleeve. "Will he?" 

Snort. "Don't be stupid, Potter. Voldemort's power is the only salvation he knows." Watching him, I think I can see the world reflected in those eyes. Those changeling eyes that shift from the color of tempestuous seas to complacent forests to the lucent shine of summer leaves. 

"You want my help?" he asks, confusion evident in his voice. (What colors am I painted in now? Every color comes from white. What colors come from black?) 

"No, I just came because the thought of never seeing you again after Hogwarts was too much to bear." I roll my eyes. We are both standing face to face, our raised voices having faded into the stiflingly hot late morning and having lowered to tones of cautious questions. "I-" 

He smirks at me. (Perhaps he isn't all saint. Yet perhaps the attraction of variegated plumage is greater than dove feathers.) "You can't say it, can you? Poor, proud Malfoy can't admit that he needs help." 

"That's not-" 

"You're just like your father," he taunts. "Too proud to do anything but the worst." 

I've been told that I freeze up when I am the angriest. My features slip, set, into an impassive mask. I don't know, but that's probably how I look seizing his arms and coming preciously near to shaking him. "I am not like my father! You even _dare_ to think-" 

"Prove it. Say you need my help." There is a brief glitter of amusement in those verdant orbs and I wonder - and not for the first time - if he is not made of layers, paint peeling and peeling but always revealing something new. Unpredictable, that. "Oh," he adds, trying in vain to push back the tiniest upturning of the corners of his mouth, "and say please." 

"I'd rather be a Death Eater." 

It irks me to think that he's figured me out when he still lies before me like an unfinished puzzle. But maybe he hasn't, hesitance still hovering in his gaze even when his voice rings confidently. "Would you really?" 

If silence attracted people's ears as much as screams, then the entire neighborhood would be gawking. I used to think that Potter was as fragile as blue-rimmed china or the rough parchment of Hogwarts that crumples in frustrated fingers, but he is iron beneath my furious grip and raging glare. (If he turns me to fragile glass, I turn him to rigid steel.) He meets my gaze solidly, waiting, and I wait for my resolve to melt like ice cream in the summer heat. 

"Well?" (I thought only I was allowed to smirk like that.) 

It's a whisper, when it comes. "I need your help, Potter. And you aren't getting a please." 

"I'll excuse that to your bad manners." He's openly grinning now and I feel the urge to slap him. Possibly break him to useless pieces, fragments of power like a broken wand. But when he carefully removes his arms from my grip, his expression and voice are serious. "What do you want me to do? I guess I'm flattered-" his expression told me that he wasn't - "that you came to me, but there's really nothing I can do. You could always go to Dumbledore-" 

"_No._" 

"To be frank, Malfoy, that's your best option right now." 

"No, it's not. Because it isn't an option." 

He looks frustrated and I probably can't blame him. "Can't you just stand up to your father and tell him you won't be a follower of Voldemort?" 

I was surprised the first time Potter said his name, but I suppose enemies like he can afford to not be afraid of the name. As I can afford to, because I am not afraid of something I have heard all of my life. "If I want to see my mother again," I say frankly. "In other words, Potter, of course not." 

He sighs. "Tell your father or whoever you need to that you want to gain the trust of - well, everyone. You want to go to college or whatever before committing yourself to the Dark Arts because -" 

"Because I can strike when they trust me the most?" 

Though Potter grimaces, he nods reluctantly. "Do you have to put it that way? It makes me think you really _will_." 

I grin at him, warily. Without mirth, really. "Well, maybe I will. How much do you trust me?" 

He grins back with the same wary, bitter expression. "I don't." 

"Good," I say, without knowing exactly why, at the same time a voice hollers his name from up the street. _Harry! Harry, where the hell have you been?_ It is hesitantly loud, as if trying to avoid a neighborhood scene. He winces and there is a brief, panicked look on his face. "I'll - I'll send you your clothes by owl." 

For a moment that uncomfortable look on his face is gone and he laughs. It's something, that laugh. Summer wind chimes, natural and easy and likeable. "What? You don't want to strip and give them to me now?" 

I grin back. Very reluctantly. "No. Your family wants you." A large woman is standing on the doorstep, hands on her hips. She is, no doubt, demanding an immediate return home and a just as immediate explanation. I feel the slightest bit of guilt at causing the situation, but it wasn't as if he helped me to begin with. It wasn't as if - 

He glances towards me, just once. "Good luck, Malfoy." And he is jogging back to the house. Without knowing exactly what I am doing, I bend down and pick up the pebble. Dusty, misshapen, and most definitely not black or white. (Gray. As is everything.) 

I think that too many people want to create something beautiful. I think that too many people have tried and have failed. I think that I want to know just who had the mind to create Potter, because - 

Because as much as everyone wants it, it's damn hard to find. 

So maybe beauty isn't summer at all, or summer isn't beauty. Maybe his work is another dusty painting shoved away in a gilded frame at the back of a museum, lost to the collection of Time after so many years. Maybe that master dreamt too high and couldn't capture everything he felt; maybe beauty never leapt from his brush to begin with. 

Maybe - 

Maybe it was in a pair of emerald green eyes regarding me through crooked glasses, staring at me with a mix of curiosity and bafflement and fading hatred; maybe it was in the way his hair shines like stars on midnight when the sun hits; maybe it was kept in that effortless smile and casual shrug. Maybe it was lost in the nauseating rush of confusion that comes from having the momentum of your apathetic abhorrence stolen; maybe it was part of something no dreaming painter could ever imagine. (Maybe it still is.) 

So much for summertime. 


	5. autumn (silence)

  
Part Five : Silence

  


It isn't that I know my fate, but that I am a good guesser. That's why it doesn't surprise me when I see that tousled head at orientation. And just when I think he has ceased to cause me such surprise, he walks over to me and grins ruefully. That, somehow, is unexpected. 

"Hullo," he says grudgingly, hands stuck in his pockets. "Should've known I'd see you here." 

I shrug. "I suppose so." 

"Your father didn't come?" he questions, taking a seat on the bench beside me. 

I smile briefly, bitterly. "If he didn't attend my mother's funeral, why would he come to Auror Orientation? You should know that, Potter." I watch him shrug, watch the fabric and shadows shift. "And no, you can't sit there." 

"Too bad." 

We sit in all too comfortable silence for several moments. 

"So your summer -" he begins, at the exact same moment that I start out, "I told him-" 

We both stop. Wait. Meet each other's eyes at some sort of impasse, both of our gazes hesitant. "You go ahead," he finally says. How gracious. 

I sigh. "I told him what you said to tell him." He glances at me quizzically, not as much of a question as a curiosity at the outcome, and I roll up my sleeve. Pale white flesh there, unmarked. White as the autumn moon, not even marred by vague scars or healing scratches. Only in hazy dreams do I consider, and even then I don't want to be an object of pity or scorn. I don't crave sympathy, I don't need it. I don't even want it. 

I don't want any symbol of pain or feeling written so plainly on my skin. 

There is a strange look in his eyes when he looks over my arm and it makes me think that maybe all kinds of pain don't have to be written out for the world to see, inscribed in tell-tale lines of fading red. (No, some kinds of pain are quite the opposite: green as shattering jade, burning and needing and Avada Kedavra light.) It makes me wonder just when that pity and sympathy and all-too-trashy concern like my mother's cheap perfume in his gaze faded like the hatred did, replaced with - 

"Welcome to the Auror Academy," a voice booms out over us and we both jump slightly, recoiling from each other with a guilty look haunting both our eyes. "Your choice to apply here is a choice that will affect the rest of your life. On your journey to become one of the distinguished members of our profession, you will learn things you've never dreamt about your life, your companions, and yourself. The experiences you will gain here are like no other. 

"In short, this is the experience of a lifetime." 

He is so near, delicate eyelashes and skin of toffee cream. There is something about his scent that makes me want to move still nearer. (Hot apples and caramel, Potter, with your cinnamon breath. There is something intoxicating about that gentle autumn spice, and I don't think I can pull away.) 

I think about moving my knee to absently brush his, but the thought appalls me and I must look elsewhere. That's when the knee bumps mine and I jump to look at him in surprise. (Skin against skin, shared warmth; I feel the knobby kneecap and fine dusting of hair.) He looks back at me solidly. 

"Pay attention," he hisses, having successfully caught my eye. I jerk away from him, eyes narrowed, focused back on the speaker. 

"This isn't Hogwarts anymore, boys and girls." Somewhere during my mind's vacation, his voice has hardened from the facilitating, welcoming speaker to dangerous steel. "You aren't all comfy in your Durmstrang dormitories or surrounded by your previous schoolmates. This, _children_, is serious." 

I hate condescension. I hate undue patronization, and apparently Potter does too. He looks curious and perhaps a little frightened, but mostly he looks pissed off. I can see the tension in his face. 

"In the next four years," the speaker continues, as I notice how intent the others are on his voice, "you will need all you possess to get through. Your wits, your courage, your cunning, your cooperation. Some of you won't make it. Some of you will fail, some of you will give up." He sweeps his eyes over us, trying to gauge. "A very select few will make it. They, and they alone, will have the privilege of calling themselves Aurors." 

I exchange a glance with Potter. Both of us know the challenge that the school provides, and neither of us looks very afraid. It is almost a challenge to each other; clearly, whoever fails or gets expelled or quits is the blatant loser. 

I don't lose. Perhaps it's one thing I have in common with my father, as sad as it may be to admit such. 

And part of my mind wonders, very briefly, what would happen if we weren't competing, weren't fighting, weren't enemies, but - 

"Now, kiss your families a loving goodbye. You'll be wishing like hell to be with them for the next few months. Come on now, to the dorms. Girls to the left, boys to the right; A through H in the first, I through Q in the second, R through Z in the third. Get to it!" 

We leap almost automatically to our feet and I follow him down the aisle to where the speaker has pointed. It surprises me a little that I only recognize one or two others. "Look," I say. "There's Jelena Thompson, from Ravenclaw? And he looks familiar, doesn't he?" 

Potter shrugs. He doesn't seem overly interested and, surprisingly enough, the others don't seem overly interested in him either. Perhaps they haven't noticed his scar. We tramp together over the lawns, entering the stark barracks labelled, simply, M2. I don't look at him and he doesn't look at me. Are we walking together? I'm not sure. It seems, by the furtive glances he sneaks at me, that he isn't sure either. 

"Wow." He looks around at the mess hall we've entered, then back at me. "It's - it's so not like Hogwarts." 

I smirk. "Should feel familiar, Potter. Just as stark and bare as your homey little closet." 

He stares at me angrily for a moment, before striding off into the milling crowd at the stairs. I glare at his retreating figure before I finally cross my arms and follow. Be damned if I'll change the way I am to accommodate him, even for four years. 

We crowd up the stairs and into the dormitory. He sits his things on the bed two down from mine; we find ourselves separated by Mulligan and Mulligan, two equally sullen twins who have just dumped their things and exited. 

We both sit. We both stare at our stark surroundings. Eventually the other boys drift off to explore and we are left to ourselves, both avoiding each other's gaze. (As Avada Kedavra green scares you, your jade gaze frightens me, Potter. What do you see with those eyes? What do you see in me?) 

"So I have to spend the next four years of my life with you, Malfoy?" 

From what I can tell, there is little malice in the question. "What, none of your precious fan club here?" 

Potter shrugs uncomfortably. "Ron's working for his father, Herm's to become a Mediwitch. I don't know, Seamus applied but he didn't get in. I really didn't have anywhere else to go, so I applied here too." 

"And the additional prestige of being The Boy Who Lived does help, huh?" 

"How much did your father pay to get you in here?" he snarls back, shoving his bag on the floor. I listen to it thump and we descend into silence. Again, it is a comfortable silence: as if we are used to each other and quite satisfied in our voiceless communications. (Green and silver checkerboard. Tell me, what color am I today?) It makes me wonder, idly, exactly how these four years will go. 

He rolls over on his back, eyes searching the ceiling for answers. "You do know I hate you, don't you?" he wonders conversationally. 

"As much as I hate you, Potter." And yet, as love is blind, so is hate. How can I call it such, then, when his wind-chapped skin and ravenwing hair hover like stark photographs on the backs of my eyelids? How can I pretend he is black and white when he moves through the world like a rainbow umbrella on a rainy day? 

"All right, then." He rummages with one hand (ragged fingernails, sketchy lines across his bruised flower petal skin) in his bag and withdraws a silvery bar. It's only after unwrapping it and taking several bites that he remembers me, gaze like wondering forest light shifting my way. "Um," he says uncomfortably. "Want some?" 

I accept the candy from him and take a bite, the rich taste of chocolate stinging my taste buds into being. (Part of me wonders if it shows our maturity that we don't recoil from each other's saliva. Part of me wonders if that's part of the chocolate sweetness.) 

"In the autumn," I say haltingly, "at Malfoy Manor, the leaves all change at once. It's really beautiful." 

He shifts on his bed, a reluctant interest tinting those eyes of beach glass green. Perhaps it is an interest in the manor, a thing of which I have never spoken. Or perhaps he has never heard me use the word beautiful before; maybe he thinks it sounds alien coming from me. (But I can think of many beautiful things. The sky. My father, when he is angry. The lake near to our home at sunrise. My mother's hands. You.) 

"It's nice at Privet Drive, too," he finally returns in an uncertain tone. I laugh. 

"Right, Potter. I was _there_. I saw your pathetic excuse for a room. I wore your ruddy _clothes_." 

He looks away, out the window into the gathering warmth of late afternoon. "Speaking of that, I got the clothes by owl. Thanks." He grins ruefully. "Damn, that thing is vicious! Nearly bit my thumb off." 

I smile, ever so faintly. Could he tell how reluctant I was to give up those garments, Muggle or no? Probably not. Potter was always that dense. 

"So you-" I begin, at the same time he says, "We aren't-" 

"You go." 

"Nah. Go ahead." 

"Seriously, just-" 

"-say what-" 

"-you were going to say!" 

We somehow end up glaring at each other, as if we do not deserve to finish each other's sentences. Silence rules us for several moments, until I finally throw caution away and dig in my pocket. Finding the object, I stretch out my hand and say quietly, "Here." 

He regards me as if I'm trying to poison him or perhaps give him something really nasty, but he opens his hand nevertheless. Clearly, the pebble that lands there surprises him. "What the hell?" his gaze seems to ask me. 

I shrug. "It's a stone." 

"I can see that." 

"I - I sort of put protection spells on it," I say. "To, er. Protect you." 

He raises an eyebrow. "Way to state the obvious. Again. _Why_, Malfoy?" 

"Because who else am I going to talk to if you go and get yourself killed? Mulligan and Mulligan, here?" When I get no response from him, I look away. "And you did try to help." 

(Bewilderment flutters over his face, tinting his cheeks and swirling his gaze and twitching his lips. The second time in a single moment I have surprised him, and I find that I like keeping him off balance like that. Find that his expressions are not numerable, after all.) 

"I - I suppose I did." There is a hesitant tinge to his face and I am startled to see him blush. Perhaps he is not the only one kept off balance. "Um. Sorry for being, you know. Rude about it." 

"No." We both look away, gazes pooling with the shadows in opposite corners of the room. "Don't be." 

Silence, as cold and final and filled with hazy gray as impassive stone, drifts between us like a strange sort of bond. He glances down into the palm of his hand tickled by the tiny stone I have given him. "It glows," he says softly. He picks it up, turns it almost wonderingly between his fingers. (Was there a time you would push it away; was there a time when you would feel it was contaminated by my overwhelming black? Tell me, now, how gray ceases to scare you. How its ashen touch has graced your lips and skin and slipped through your fingers, tainted your gaze and dusted your cheekbones; how its brave, ambiguous light has traced all the lines of your skin and settled there like I want to for eternity. Show me.) "Is that because of the spells?" 

"Probably." I remember my surprise at, when fiddling with the pebble, seeing it begin to throb with a steady green light. 

"Slytherin green, huh?" 

"Your eyes are green." 

He smiles, suddenly. Fleetingly. (What have I done to so deserve? When have I noticed your smile is sweet like vintage wine, bittersweet and enchanting and powerful?) "That's true." 

We slip, smoothly and complacently, without struggle, back into the strangely comfortable silence. Sharing the nuances and shadowy comforts of this quiet. 

"So," he finally says, gaze tickling the ceiling, "what exactly is so different from Muggle clothes and wizarding clothes? You were so adamant about not wearing mine, but you wear the same thing under those robes." 

I smirk. "You sure about that, Potter? The latest fashion is to wear nothing at all." 

"Oh, right. Sure." He rolls his eyes. "Seriously, I'm asking." 

"There are shops," I shrug. "You know, same styles, but made by wizards. No _Muggle_ touches the clothes." 

"Ah," he says, sarcastically. "I see. That makes _so_ much difference." 

"To some people, it does." I frown at him. "Look, Potter. I know this is a screwed up world and that you don't agree with most of it. Hell, I don't agree with most of it. But you still don't know the first thing about it. You've got to understand: we've lived this way for thousands of years. You can't just blow in here and change everything with a snap of your fingers. Even if you are Harry Potter." 

"I-" He glares at me, probably for lack of anything else to feel. "I'm not trying to. Just - just because things have been this way forever doesn't mean they always have to be. Don't you people ever change?" 

"It takes time. That's what you don't get. Gradual change has been building up for years." 

"What if that's not good enough? What if you're just all scared to death of it? You're just all clinging to the roots of your family trees and the pathetic power you collect but nobody ever tries to change anything. Doesn't anyone ever question the status quo?" 

"The hell do you think we're in the middle of right now, Potter? What do you think Voldemort is, a madman?" Pause. "Well, maybe he is, but do you know where it started? He wanted change." 

"The wrong kind of change." 

"It's still change." 

He stares at me, then reluctantly shrugs. "I suppose you're right. Doesn't mean I support it, though." 

I shrug back. "You don't have to." 

The curve of his lips, seashell pink, like the pulse of the autumn sky just before the sun sinks to final rest. And I wonder, truly, if the rush received by provoking that smile is a power that can ever be satiated. (I could not lose myself like you, Father. Not in porcelain statues, one of them your wife. Not in mindless servitude. Not in fleeting moments of control. 

There are other kinds of salvation. I will not be the martyr at your altar, lifeblood slipping so you can be your own god.) 

_Save your last drops from the shadow. Dragon's blood may save but it also condemns._

"Malfoy? Malfoy!" 

"What?" I snap, irritably. 

"You blanked out. Just, totally didn't hear a word I said." 

"Oh. Sorry." 

And since when have we stopped trading words like blows and started trading them like things to be shared? Perhaps it is since the pieces we play with are all the same now, not mine, not his, but simply ours. 

("Sharing," Father once lectured me, after I lent a childhood toy to a Muggle at the park, "is only appropriate when the other is your equal. And you, Draco, are always better. Remember that.") 

(Are we equals, Potter?) 

Sharing. Sharing drinks, conversation, a broomstick, clothing, time, laughter, the room, silence. Are we- 

"We aren't friends, you know." 

I stare at him, coldly. "I know." 

"Never will be." 

"Wouldn't want to be." 

"Good." 

"It's mutual." 

He turns over, restlessly, and stands up. Regards me with that gaze of shattering jade as if he is probing my mind with those green glass shards. "I.... Uh.... I'm going downstairs. You coming?" I stand, wordlessly, noticing that he's slipped the pebble in his pocket and is absently fiddling with it. I smile faintly and follow him to the door. We descend in companionable silence. 

Autumn is colorful, drenched in the rich tones of crimson wines and spices and the flush of his cheeks and the veins with their precious blood pumping beneath his cinnamon skin. Somewhere in the change of seasons we have slipped from everything we knew in the past and something between us has transmuted into something else. 

Something as strong as stone and sweet as chocolate and slow as the silence we breathe back and forth. 

Something shared.   



	6. winter (blood)

Whee. I hate to say it, but I am totally binging on this project right now, and so I've made a decision. Instead of being nine chapters, it's now thirteen. So yes, everyone, there are many more to come. Hurrah, hurrah. ^-^ For Michi, my wonderful, extra awesome beta, you rock! Many, many thanks!   


Part Six : Blood

  
  


It is winter and I am held in shackles like ice, skin as translucent as the finest parchment and blood pumping thinly in trails of blue ink. Sometimes it feels as if I am, indeed, freezing to death. (My heart jolting, breath coming ragged and strained, fingers trembling uncontrollably. Why? Why must it be this way?) 

Because he is there, and so close, and yet - 

We're partners now because that's the way things are. There is no best-friend Weasley or knowing Granger and now I am all he has. I don't know if that's a good or welcome thing, but I'm the one he plays chess with in the evenings and I'm the one he relies upon for homework help and I'm the one he looks to on too-gray afternoons when the wind shrieks outside. You would think I'd get tired of him. But every time he says my name - he clings to the word Malfoy like it's a childish reminder of our hatred - I look at him and it seems I see him for the first time. 

"Don't you two ever go anywhere?" asks Ernie Mulligan, shifting his weight back and forth as he waits for his brother. "Every time I come in the damn room, you're both sitting here." 

"Leave it," Nicolas Mulligan persuades him, having successfully retrieved his jacket and now waiting impatiently. "Jeanne's waiting." With that reminder, Ernie gives the two of us a none-so-friendly smile and follows his twin out the door. For being so sullen all of the time, they sure have a more active social life than the two of us. 

"Well," I say. 

Potter looks up for the first time since they entered the room. (It's childish to constantly call me Malfoy like some shield, but I can't bring myself to call him Harry. So where lies the difference?) "Well, what?" He has been working on his project for Advanced Potions the last week without fail and that is what he is bent over now. 

"Are you ever going to finish that?" I feel the fire against my back in the small fireplace at the end of our dorm. I can, too, hear it crackling. "I'm nearly done. What are you dithering on about?" 

"I am _not_ dithering." He only shrugs and goes back to writing in that messy scrawl of his. 

Silence. 

"Potter," I say, voice irritated, "don't you ever go out?" 

He looks up from his books, silent for a moment, then slams one shut. "I'll have you know, I am going out tonight. Right now." After throwing his books and supplies none too gently on his bed, he yanks his cloak from his bedpost. Hagrid sent him the wretched, handmade garment a month ago for Christmas. I have no idea why he wears the ratty thing. 

"What, in _that_?" 

"Sod off, Malfoy." He disappears out the door and the room sinks into solitude, the last bits of sunlight sinking red through the wall of windows to my left. My books are bathed in copper, lost in the bloody fall of the sun. The trees, too, bare as skeletons, are tipped in ruddy gold. 

I shiver in the sudden silence of his absence. It wasn't my fault, really, for provoking him into leaving with such spontaneity. Of course not. Frowning, I stab at the parchment with my quill. 

_The effect of blood power is the strongest known magic in this world._

I stare at the writing, _my_ writing, and scribble it out angrily. Why must I write so precisely, so reminiscent of my father? Why can't my feminine script be sprawling and illegible like _his_? 

I shove the papers back, angrily. I lied when I said I was almost done; I've barely begun the thing. I've been rewriting it for two weeks, as has Potter. Perhaps he is dithering on about something or other, but he always seems to know what to say. I haven't a clue. He hasn't seemed as frustrated as I have, worn out to the point of exhaustion, working on and on without an inkling of where I am going. I retrieve my cauldron and sit it on the table, staring at its pale sheen. Originally I'd planned to coincide my Advanced Potions assignment (create your own Potion and detail the process, etceteras, in research paper format) with my Fundamentals of Magic Principles paper. Only it isn't quite going as planned. 

The trees and distant buildings are silhouetted against the sunset, the room dusted with a faint orange glow. I pull out the library book on potions, flipping automatically to the page. It is already well worn. 

Running my finger down the list of ingredients, I nod to myself. I have practically memorized them, could recite them half asleep. (Only my nights are wracked with insomnia and fevered dreams of _him_. Must I wake with dread's wintry fingers scraping my spine, only to sit up and stare over the motionless forms of Mulligan and Mulligan at his serene expression? Bathed in moonlight, so vulnerable without his glasses, that scar trailing down his forehead behind the curtain of shadow. It is the worst sort of torment, and everywhere I turn he is there.) 

The seniors all tell us that Professor Kimball's expectations are ridiculous. No one actually creates their own potion; they steal some obscure and probably useless potion from a book and do their best to make up a feasible story about creating it. Of course, Professor knows that, and he hands out grades randomly anyway. It is largely unfair, but he knows potions better than Snape, and that impresses me. 

Potter found some ridiculous potion that makes your skin change colors. It is positively useless, as far as I can see, but probably one of the most interesting in our class. 

And I? I am the one that thinks he can do what no one else can. I am the egotistical little rich boy who is bound and determined to create his own potion. Of course, it's based almost completely off of the one I found, but there are several changes I plan to make. Had planned, except that the entire assignment is due next week - and the Fundamentals paper the day after - and I don't know what to say. 

Only Malfoys don't give up. They die reaching for ridiculous dreams of power and pomposity, lost in the still-lingering call of ancient hopes. They always will, I suppose. 

Sometimes I think I am in over my head in so many, many ways. I am drowning beneath the ice of his cold gaze and I can't even fight the chill of winter. I can't struggle. I don't want to. Because there is that dream and it is not the age-old dream of power. (A fool, I am. No Malfoy loves. No Malfoy dreams such highfalutin dreams. We fall at the feet of power, bound with our own longings, but it is a cold and glittering dream that leaves us shivering and mere collectors of porcelain statues. It should not be about craving warmth and hair as black as the water beneath the winter sheet of ice and eyes as piercing as any winter breeze and lips that speak my name as if it makes no difference when it should, when I want it to. I want everything to make a difference to him. But he is as unshakable as my father's dream, and what else can I do?) 

Fuck all of this. I _am_ drowning, and I don't seem to realize or care. Maybe that is the mercy of Winter. Maybe that is as merciful as Harry Bloody Potter gets to people like me. 

Do I want to realize? Do I want to care? Or do I want to sink into this wistful dreaming haze and perhaps it isn't gratifying and perhaps it isn't everything and perhaps I have gone absolutely stark raving mad, but what dream ever satisfies you completely? 

I prick my finger, ever so gently, and let the blood fall. 

I like potions. Pansy used to laugh at me, used to pressure the others into laughing. Snape's little pet, she would snicker. (Later, I learned that her mother had been sleeping with my father. It lasted about two weeks, but it was enough to make me regret ever seeing Pansy's sneering face.) I truly like potions, though. I like the way the ingredients swirl, the danger, the ever-pulsing need for perfection. 

Perfection is something I can relate to. And while I cannot live up to my father's dream, perhaps I can satisfy this demand. This need for everything to be perfectly done. 

I withdraw the vial from my pocket and tip its contents gently into the cauldron. It bubbles. It is a pale green, and I stir it slowly. After adding the last of the nectar, there is but one ingredient left. I stare down at the carefully measured pool of blood that has seeped from my finger, then lift it gently and tip it into the potion. (Red and green, is that how it's to be? Gryffindor and Slytherin, bleeding together into a liquid of purest translucence.) 

And I have done it. It is a potion that forever binds the giver to the drinker, and it simmers ever so gently in my cauldron. Harmless to the giver, of course. I take a bit on my finger and put it to my tongue, tasting the shivery, coppery taste of it. I imagine it tastes a bit like melting snowflakes, if they weren't so cold. 

I draw my wand, point it, and whisper, "_Dissolutia_." 

And later, when I am bent over my parchment with the neat lines of my handwriting, absently wondering where he has gone and what he is doing and if he is possibly thinking of me, alone with my writing and my silence and my blood, I try to remember that taste. 

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it didn't taste quite as simple as snowflakes, fluttering on his eyelashes and dancing through the midnight silk of his hair. Maybe it tasted addicting, like adrenaline, like the hottest part of the fire where the bluest flames dance. Maybe it tasted like power. 

_It is derived from a simple spell to bind ones livestock to ones property, as used in the days where farming was more lucrative_, I write. _At such a time, the wizard would collect the blood of his animals and spread the potion on his land. They would not be able to stray much further._

Pause, for cramping fingers. 

_With simple adaptations, this potion binds one to the drinker with the use of one's own blood. Its use is very dangerous, on a level with the Unforgivable Curses and love potions, a reason why it has not been tested and its use is not recommended. The termination of this potion is exceedingly difficult: the only antidote, as such, is death._

I stop, quill tickling the corner of my mouth. Why, exactly, did I create it? The use of blood intrigues me, I suppose. The ties that blood forms, a train of thought I know all too well. It is simple, really, yet the entire magical world is in an upset over it. 

Yes, I think it did taste like power. (And maybe, Father, there are different kinds of power dreams.) 

The words swim beneath my wavering gaze and I gather the papers tiredly. Where is the git? He didn't have to stomp out of here like I'd offended him somehow. (I just can't work with his melting emerald gaze interrogating me. I can't think when he is that near.) He didn't have to act as if he cared what I thought. 

Because we hate each other. Right, Potter? 

I fall asleep without meaning to, shivering half under the blankets in my clothes. The parchment lies scattered over the nightstand beside my bed, and the last rays of evening do not disturb my sleep. No, actually, it is another sort of light that stirs my dreams: emerald, to be exact, disconcertingly quizzing me. Asking me why we are the way we are, so far apart when we are just about the only thing keeping each other sane. Asking me who I am, why he cannot hate me the way he always did. Asking me when I stopped hating him the way I always did, and started - 

"Malfoy! _Malfoy_!" His touch is petal-soft on my skin and, still lost in the hazy state between dream and reality, I have to concede that there is probably no better way to wake up than to him. 

He grabs my shirt and yanks me forward, shaking me. "Wake _up_, go - oh, you are awake. Um. Good." 

"The hell do you want, Potter?" I glance at my watch and blink. "It's two in the morning! What-" It is then that I realize he is shaking. "Potter? Are you all right?" 

"I-I'm fine." He realizes in turn that he is still clutching my shirt and releases. I move back so I can sit up without his weight on my legs. "I - I'm alive, which is something." And he yanks something around his neck to the forefront, waving it in my face. It takes me a moment to recognize it as the stone I gave him, the stone we kicked together down deserted Privet Drive. "What did you do to this, Malfoy?" 

"What do you mean, what did I do to it?" 

"Stop being stupid!" His eyes are practically glowing in the shadows, lit within by inner light. "This-" He looked away, almost ashamed. "This saved my life, tonight." 

I frown. "Where the hell were you?" 

"It's a secret." 

It is my turn to grab his shirt, which I realize, too late, is ripped and dusty. "Potter, I'll repeat myself; where the hell were you?" 

"With Dumbledore," he mutters. "A - a mission, of sorts." 

"How did that thing save your life?" 

"V - Voldemort couldn't touch me, Malfoy. He could barely come near me. The hell did you do? Is this some Dark Arts spell?" 

I take the stone from him, looking at it. It's faint green glow throbs gently. "No," I say carefully. "No, actually, Potter. I didn't do anything at all to it." He looks at me, frowning, and I continue. "I didn't put any protection spells on it. I didn't use the Dark Arts on it. I just drilled a hole in it and tried to Transfigure it, which never worked. It started glowing instead, that's all." 

He is too stunned to even speak. "You - wh - _why_?" 

I shrug. "It was pretty." 

"Why in bloody hell did you tell me you put protection spells on it, then? I could've died!" 

"I wanted you to keep it." I'm glad that it is dark, or he might catch sight of the tint in my cheeks. "And you _didn't_ die, Potter. Why didn't you?" 

"Like I know!" He frowns. "Malfoy, damn you! Of course you'd be the one to tell me you put spells on here and not actually do it. That's ridiculous. I should've known you'd pull something like that." Staring at me, as if trying to puzzle out something especially enigmatic, he shakes his head and turns away. "All right. I suppose I called it upon myself. I did say that I don't trust you." 

The words shiver between us like breath in the air on a cold day, and I too must look from him. He is disappointed, he is hurt, and somehow that is more painful than any sort of literal frostbite. "It wasn't as if you did," I finally say, trying to keep my words level. "You didn't rely on it for protection or any such thing." 

"True," he admits, grudgingly. "To tell you the truth, I forgot about it. But Malfoy, what happened to it? You're sure you didn't do anything?" 

"Quite sure," I reply. 

The shadows paint his face all sorts of ghostly colors, slipping like aged bruises across his cheeks. His eyes are wide and I can see in the brief moonlight that his clothes are torn. (Where did you take him, Dumbledore? Why did you endanger him this time, was it for Azkaban or some Mudblood family or what? Why do you have to keep putting him in this danger? He could have died, and I wouldn't even know.) 

"There's one thing," he finally tells me slowly. "When my mother died, her - her love for me sort of protected me from that time on. I don't understand it entirely. Something about her death protected me. Until in fourth year, when Voldemort took my blood and then he could touch me again." 

I stare at him, incredulously. (My heart is jumping nervously, skipping over the surface of his icy glare.) "Are you trying to tell me that I'm in_ love_ with you, Potter?" 

"Of - of course not! I was just _saying_. I don't know anything about it, I guess I could owl Dumbledore and ask him-" 

"No! Don't be ridiculous! It was probably just a fluke, I mean, how do you know that it was even this stone?" 

He rolls his eyes. "Gee, I wonder what else could have flared all green and made Voldemort scream in pain. I could feel it, like, throbbing." We both fall into silence and realize that we have not been the quietest in our argument. Half the dorm is awake, restlessly tossing and turning and generally muttering about the disquiet. He exchanges a glance with me. "Look-" 

I catch his sleeve as he stands. "Potter," I say quietly. "Take me with you, next time." 

His eyes snap. "What? Why?" 

"Because." A faint smirk, the everyday mask that's become so much habit that it doesn't even hurt. Even worn for him. "You_ obviously_ need my protection." 

"I do not!" 

"Do so!" 

"Do not!" Pause. "Oh, for God's sakes, I'm not going through this childish argument with you. No, Malfoy. I don't trust you. Why should I?" 

"You shouldn't." I still grasp his sleeve. "But take me with you." 

"But your father-" 

"Can go and die for all I care. Potter." I make him look at me and he does so, reluctantly, eyes burning as steadily as the stone. "Please." 

"I don't know why it matters so much to you," he says quietly, "but all right. If you let me write to Dumbledore." When I frown, he glares. "I have to tell him exactly what happened tonight, Malfoy. I'll need to explain, anyhow. It can't hurt if I ask him." 

"All right," I finally growl, letting go of his tattered sleeve. "Now, I'm going back to sleep." 

That is not tenderness in his eyes when he turns away. It is not. Of course not. (Ah, but do I want it to be?) "Good morning, then." He smiles, ever so faintly. "And thanks." 

It is not surprising that we share insomnia like everything else lately, and I can hear him tossing restlessly far into the dawn. Moonlight shivers across the floor in relentless patterns until it is finally replaced with the sun's earliest tendrils of light, and I have to bury my face in the pillow to find the last sustaining bit of darkness. His voice is still echoing in my head, hours later, his quiet thanks lingering when all the insults have streamed away. 

He is thanking me for something I didn't do, when I never had the bravery or the breath to thank him for anything. (His hand on my wrist, leading me through the stark gravestones. His scent on my skin, the feel of his clothes. His voice in my ears, frustrated, trying to find a solution for something that never troubled him and only troubled me. His books, his papers, his hands, his laugh, his eyes, his breath, his company, his everything, in my life.) 

I give up on sleep, as it has eluded me for hours, and slide back into a sitting position. Beside me, Ernie Mulligan is snoring loudly, and further down the room someone is competing with him. 

From my nightstand I take the roll of parchment and squint at it in the early dawn; I can just make out the words in the pale light that shines through our dormitory. _Blood is the single greatest influence on our world_, my Fundamentals of Magic Principles paper says. _Whether acknowledged or not, it rules many of our thoughts and sentiments, even causing the extreme measures of death and torture that are known to occur throughout history. Why?_

That is, indeed, the question. And there is a question in those eyes of pained green when I look up and find his gaze upon me. So insomnia has another victim. 

"What are you doing?" he mouths to me, brow furrowed. 

I mouth back, "Potions." 

The closest thing to a smile I've seen all night from him slips across his face. There are dark circles beneath his eyes and he looks as if he's just been through a fortnight of nightmares. (Maybe he has. I'm sure something more frightening than he haunts his dreams, though he is the only thing that torments _my_ sleep.) I watch him slip out of bed and walk to the window, scratching his head absently. 

"Potter," I call softly, and he turns. Beat. Here I am, drowning again, struggling for breath against the tide of his eyes. "I... Um." Ice shivers against my skin, icicle bars driving my heartbeat. My voice is encased in winter and I think that if I open my mouth, perhaps nothing but frozen breath will emerge to paint the room in harsh white. "N-nothing." 

He squints at me as if he maybe doesn't believe me, but only shrugs and turns away. I watch his shadowy figure disappear down the stairs and think that perhaps he is going for a walk in the misty dawn. If I were braver or perhaps more confident, I would follow; only I am not a Gryffindor and I am not the self-assured boy everyone seems to think I am. So here I am. Sleepless, shivering, and very solitary. 

The blood pounds in my ears as I stare at the rumpled sheets he has abandoned, the empty bed just two down that he tossed and turned in all night. 

Bloody hell. I hate winter.   



	7. spring (sky)

  
Part Seven : Sky

  


My mother was not always staunchly against Muggles, you know. In fact, when I was a child, she largely neglected me, and sent me wherever she could to get me out of her hair. Then she would go off to lunch with her friends, out shopping, or the like. Father didn't know. Father didn't care. 

(He still doesn't.) 

I often found myself left with Muggle children, fighting over toys and pushing each other into the sandbox and every other childish occurrence that children naturally go through. It wasn't a happy experience, no matter what I might pretend. I was all of five years old and had the vocabulary of a child twice my age, not to mention the odd wizard robes. (I think in some way she never knew how to entertain a child and so raised me as a younger version of my father. I shall resent that all of my life.) 

Bullies liked me. In fact, they liked pushing me. A lot. I like bullies, in a general sense - in the general sense that they are not bullying me. But these Muggles were, specifically, and the only spell I knew was _Lumos_. 

Mother picked me up from wherever I happened to be whiling away my day, kissed me on the forehead, and tottered off with me in a cloud of alcohol and perfume. (Sickeningly sweet, flower petals and white wine and fluttery laughter. Back then she always seemed ethereal and glamorous, a fairy queen beauty star. Now the only memory I can focus on is the last and she, wilted like a dying flower, beside me, skin gray against the sheets.) She never asked. I never offered. We did not share anything but a fear of my father's wrath, my mother and I. Back then, she was as distant as the sun. 

There was a slide at the playground and, in my young eyes, it was enormous. I hated it. I didn't see the point of climbing to the sky only to tumble back earthwards. And the lack of control: on a broomstick, at least, you have control. Not on that slide I so loathed. 

There was a bully named Christopher. He made me go down. And I loved it. It was a rush and it was like letting go of everything and it was free fall from the sky and I know that Malfoys crave control and power and domination and must always be proper but at that moment I wasn't really a Malfoy anyway and all I knew was that I was free and that it was fun. 

I landed at the bottom and Christopher pummeled me until his knuckles were red and I spiraled into blackness. 

I don't know why. Maybe that was his slide experience, his rush, his time to let go and fly and lose control and have fun. Who knows. Maybe he was just a stupid Muggle. 

My mother took a more active role in my upbringing. I began to insist on trying magic. And I did not play with Muggles anymore. 

I also avoided slides. I didn't want that freedom. I didn't taste that freedom, not until I saw Potter fly and went home for the holidays and raced the clouds. I think I can still feel the gentle, tickling calling of it every time he looks at me. 

That doesn't explain why I am flying feverish, precise laps over the Auror Academy's rolling hills, nor does it explain why Potter is rising to meet me with something fluttering in his palm, but maybe it will help. (He is grinning at me, and I think that perhaps the last lingering breaths of clouds disintegrate around us. How cliché of you, Draco.) 

"Nice day," he calls, soaring closer. His hand, or rather its contents, glints in the sun. 

"What are you doing out here, Potter?" 

"Flying," says he, quite cheekily. "What does it look like?" 

"Aren't you supposed to be helping Kimball right now? Or something?" I watch the wind toss his hair and snatch at the tiny wings peeking through his fingers and I sigh. 

"Stop reminding me," he retorts, rolling his eyes. "You never miss a chance to rub it in, do you?" 

I grin. _The potion doesn't work, but it's quite an interesting concept_, was scribbled on the top of my paper, along with the highest mark in the class. There was nothing written on Potter's, but his failing marks said quite enough. He's been doing as poorly on every assignment since. 

"I think all Potions professors hold a grudge against me," Potter muses. "It's like a conspiracy." 

"It has absolutely nothing to do with your talent at potions, of course." 

Smirk. "Of course." He hovers there for a minute, looking beyond me at the hills dampened with spring's glory, and then just as suddenly is watching me. "Fancy a game?" 

The Golden Snitch is fluttering there, teasing me. I cross my arms, a balancing act. "Whatever, Potter. Everybody knows you're the better flyer." Faint grin. "Even if you do suck at Potions." 

"You're just afraid," he taunts me. "You could fly just as well if you actually tried." 

He tosses the Snitch into the air. It whirs out of our sight. I frown, but he is already speeding across the hills like a beam of prismatic light on his broomstick and I have no choice but to maintain my steady laps behind him. He is grinning, and I wonder exactly how it feels. (Are you still Harry Potter like I'm Draco Malfoy, or when you fly do you lose all of those ties? Can you, too, taste the freedom?) 

The wind is a woman and the sky is her home and she tickles my cheek with her hair. There is smoky periwinkle freedom darting just beyond the reach of my fingertips, sky so blue yet like a distant canvas for all that I can touch it. I watch him do a quick loop on his broomstick and listen to the wind. 

"Malfoy? Hello?" He frowns at me, pointing to the flash of gold. "Look, if you're not going to do anything but sit there, this is useless." 

I blink. Right. I'm supposed to be looking. It has vanished again, and we are both tracing crisscross patterns over the field. The sun beats upon our backs like a drummer in the heat, surprisingly warm for late April. But then, the piquant perfume of spring's blossoms is scattered through the air and the hills are singing of approaching summer. (They are green, like his eyes.) 

We both glimpse it at the same instant and shoot forward, leaning down as we streak towards it. His eyes are intense and I stop looking at him and focus instead on the tiny orb, seeing the wings flutter. There is warmth on my back, spring's breath in my ear, and we are both reaching, stretching, straining - 

The Snitch vanishes, and we have to jerk away before a sudden collision renders us unable to play. 

I look up, surprised, to see him laughing. There is true joy in his eyes and he glances at me, as if wondering why I am not even showing the hint of a smile. Teasing, maybe. Questions I can't answer. 

He shoots down towards me, twists in the air, and his broomstick carries him nimbly away on the breeze. I don't know when I've last seen such agile flying. Not that I frequent Quidditch games, not unless Father insists. But he could be the next Krum, probably, if he really tried. 

"Why don't you ever fly?" He frowns, having spun back to me. "You could be good at it, you know." 

"I _am_ good at it, thank you very much. And not everyone is like you." 

"Don't you enjoy it at all?" He is hovering next to me and spring is blooming in his eyes. "You'd have to be crazy not to feel it. The whole adrenaline rush, the feel of being airborne, just free?" 

My expression is blank. "Not every bird wants freedom, Potter. Sometimes it's better inside the cage." 

"It's never-" he begins, but I flash him the grin that has eluded me for so long and shoot up past him as the Snitch flickers just beyond his head. He is a hair behind me, having jerked at the last second, and I can still hear his delighted laughter in my ears as I reach for it. 

Tan fingers close belatedly around my own fist, and I can feel the Snitch tangled in my grip. He looks down at me with my triumphant smile. 

"It's never better in the cage," he says softly and releases my hand. Then he is grinning, reluctantly, and he complains, "You only won because I was talking. That's not fair." 

"You should know that Malfoys don't play fair," I retort, waving the glittering ball at him. There is something jolting in my stomach, the same feeling that jumped and danced and roiled through my veins when I leaned over his shoulder and reached for the Snitch. When I flew, and felt the rush, and the taste of elusive freedom. "Besides, you should know better than to give in to distractions. Even ones as distracting as me." Smirk, and, "Concentration is everything, Potter." 

He laughs. "You sound just like Oliver. And I was only giving you an advantage. You wouldn't have won otherwise." 

"Aw, Potter, I never knew you were such a sore loser." 

I watch him grin and see the sky reflected in his eyes. (Shame that spring is not home to skies of sunny green, absorbing the grass and the trees and the verdant paradise blooming below. Clouds of palest jade mist drift by my line of sight.) "All right, you caught the Snitch. But," and he winks, "I bet you can't catch up to me. Being that I am the superior flyer." 

"A-" I begin, but my breath is stolen by the breeze as he shoots off down the field and leaves me no choice but to follow. There is something gut wrenching and stomach flipping about cavorting around the hills at this breakneck speed, but at the same time there is a rush unmatchable by anything else. 

Well. Almost anything else, I suppose. (Is that the way you smile at your friends? Is that the way you laugh with them? Or am I but a substitute whose company you suffer? Occasionally I think I'm more, the way you look sometimes.) 

Somewhere in our chase while the wind shrieks past our ears in a trembling melody and the shocking azure of the sky spins in a drunken haze all around us, it has morphed into less of a competition and more of a flying free for all. I realize only belatedly when he zooms past me so near that I've kept the Snitch in my hand, and I am already startled into releasing it. He catches it effortlessly before it can whir away over the field, grins ebulliently at me, and lazily loops away. 

"Potter!" I kick my broomstick forward and zoom up beside him, barely noticing when he ups the speed and I keep up. We lap the field at a feverish pace, neither really paying attention. "That wasn't-" 

"Fair? I must be spending too much time with you. All that dishonesty rubbing off on me." 

"We weren't _playing_." 

He grins. "Well, it's mine now." 

"Bollocks for you." We both swerve in a sharp turn and I watch the wind tug his hair in twenty different directions at once. He is laughing and I wonder when I stopped making him tense with anger and started making him smile. (I remember his face at the Three Broomsticks, eyes nervous but chin resolute, torn between pity and loathing and possibly even amusement at times. He fought it, I know. But-) 

"You're smiling," he observes, and I find too late that he is right. "I guess the thought of a civil conversation with me no longer makes you want to rip out your ears?" 

"A torment I force myself to live through. I've got incredible willpower, you know." 

He snorts, but is already halfway across the field by that time, swerving in an almost impossible dive that I follow him into without thought. And the wind is tearing my face and the ground is rushing wildly towards me in a sea of all too familiar dizzying green and then I pull up and the sky is spinning around me and I have to laugh because otherwise the not unpleasant thudding of my heart is going to make me yell or do something drunkenly joyous that is most definitely not a Malfoy thing to do. 

He's watching me, and he's laughing too, a bit smug. "I told you." 

"Told me what?" I fly in a circle around his momentary still form, a swift circle that's rather like riding a dragon. Not that I have. (Maybe the sky doesn't spin but we do instead, creating our own tidal whirlpool skyline of giddy cerulean spring. I can't pretend that I can't hear the wind singing her jocund melodies in my ear.) 

He smirks. "You can fly." 

"Of course I can fly, Potter. Wouldn't you know? I've been doing it since I was two." 

"Ah, but did you enjoy it then?" 

I am too stunned to answer, instead zooming off across the field into an oblivion of sky and grass and mindless adrenaline where I don't have to think. He follows me and of course he catches up, being Potter. And instead of the persistence I expect, there is something glowing differently in his eyes. "Look," he hedges uncomfortably, the happy grin flickering on his face into something more somber, "I don't want to. Erm. Intrude." 

We flutter in the air, now, waiting. Like butterflies. Or the Snitch. Although I'm sure Potter would much prefer the comparison to the latter rather than the former. "What are you blathering on about?" 

"Your childhood," he says simply, and I stare. 

"Potter -" And my voice catches. It's not supposed to. Malfoys don't - Malfoys aren't - bloody hell, does it matter what Malfoys are or are not? Is that what I am, just Malfoy? Not Draco, not even to _him_. And this, for some reason, suddenly makes me angry. 

(My feet touch the ground and I am reminded of a chillier spring, a memory I quickly shake off, a memory crowded with obstinate grave markers and eyes like frosted stained glass.) 

"Malfoy!" he yells after me and that only stabs the knife further, but I cannot speak because I call him Potter. (Syllables like petals and silk on my tongue, your name a whisper of springtime. Don't let me say it; it says too much.) "Malfoy, what the hell did I say?" He swoops down, still on his broom, hovering beside me with his feet only inches from the ground. "If you want to go and sulk, fine, but don't blame it on me. I was _trying_ to be nice about it." 

"Yeah? Apparently you _have_ been spending too much time with me. That good old Slytherin sniping rubbing off on you?" 

He finally dismounts, jogging to catch up with me as I stride back towards the squat building that we call home. "What is wrong with you? 

"What do you mean, what's wrong with me?" I round on him, nails digging into the palms of my hands. "I think the fact is, there's something wrong with you. You're the one expecting me to be different than I've always been. You're the one thinking I've bloody changed. I'm not another of your little groupies, all right? I'm Draco Malfoy; I always have been. And it isn't like you to forget that." 

His eyes flash, just once, but the anger is somehow suppressed and he gives me a wry grin. "You're as moody as a cat in heat, Malfoy." 

"Excuse me?" My eyebrows shoot up. "That," I tell him, decisively, "has got to be the oddest and most unflattering comparison anyone has ever made in association with me." 

"Hey, that's what enemies are for," he says, grinning provocatively at me. 

"That, and killing you." I can't help but show the tiniest hint of a smile, biting my lip to suppress it. The sun flicks droplets of sun after us, drenching our backs with languid warmth. "I didn't mean to - to do that," I tell the grass beneath my feet. "We could fly again, if you really want to." 

It is his turn to look away, eyes evasive. "No. I, um, have to go see Kimball about that project." 

I cough to cover my laughter. (That communicable disease. That one shared needle. Oh, how I was drawn in and addicted.) "I did offer to help you." 

Bridled, he shoots back, "I don't need your help." 

"A point so blatantly supported by the fact that you're failing." 

"Right." Pausing, "Malfoy, why _did_ you get so upset when I brought up flying and everything?" 

"Because." But he is waiting, daring me not to answer. I wouldn't speak, only the way he's looking at me gives me the impression that he won't move until I do. And the melodic flutes of springtime twirl in his eyes. "I saw where you lived," I tell him, finally. "I've heard how it was. And you're pitying my childhood?" 

"I wouldn't call it pity," says he, "but yes. We're quite a bit alike, you and I." 

"And far different." 

"And far different," he agrees. We walk in silence for a bit, footprints trailing through the grass. Above us the sky tumbles in manic circles of tie-dyed blue and misty silver. He sighs and glances over to me, fingers curled about the handle of his broomstick. "Dumbledore wrote." 

"What, again?" 

He rolls his eyes. "Well, you don't have to make it sound like we never talk. Of course he wrote again. Sirius led a barely successful raid on the Death Eater stronghold in Surrey. It's near Richmond-" 

"I know. I've _been_ there." 

"Oh, well, okay." He looks at me uncomfortably. "Anyway, he also said that you can come next time _I_ get involved and you'd best come with me over the summer. When we meet, I mean." 

"Wonderful," I drawl. "I've got the old man's approval now." 

"You're such a git, Malfoy." 

I have no reply. Several beats later and I ask quietly, gently enough to make remorse flicker on his features, "Has he said anything more about the stone?" 

"Not since he told me I was lucky I had people caring enough to protect me. But that was in March." 

Dryly, "Very thorough, Dumbledore is. Sure explains it all, doesn't he?" 

"Nobody's perfect, you know." When I don't reply, he only shrugs. "I should be off, then. You know how Kimball is. I think I'm just doomed at Potions for the rest of my life." He is glancing sideways at me with a hesitant smile. A friend smile. 

"Wait." He looks at me and I swallow harshly into the benevolent springtime sky. He looks at me and the ice melts in my throat. He looks at me and I don't know why, but words slip easier from my tongue and the sun shivers courage down my back and into my soul. Something unexpected, unknown. "Thanks," I say quietly, spring's glow on my cheeks. "For. Um. You know." 

He gives me the quizzical Potter Look I have come to expect; his questioning smile is rather lopsided. "For what?" 

For caring about my mother, for kicking Weasley, for buying me a drink. For passing me in the halls and frowning like there might be more than this. For showing me your parents' graves, for trying to help me fly. For not laughing at Graduation when I felt you watching me and for the first time in my life, almost tripped myself. For lending me your clothes and your scent and your time. For sharing your chocolate and your taste, for playing chess and sometimes letting me win. For trying in vain to give me a sense of humor and presenting me with _101 Ways to Excel at Dark-Overlording_ for Christmas. For expecting less and wanting more and always, always wondering. For being colorful, Potter, for being you. For- 

"This." 

When I let our lips brush it is entirely my move, and he doesn't withdraw but he doesn't react when our breath mixes. He tastes like cherry blossoms smell, heady and sweet and intoxicating. They could bottle it like champagne and call it springtime. 

His lips are wind-chapped against mine and I think I can feel - or maybe hear, or is that mine? - his heartbeat trembling in his chest. The breeze could wrap us up together and carry us away, a whirlwind sky of black and green and gold and gray. Only he is standing there like he is stone and I am quite, acutely aware of his immobile form. He reminds me of the sky and its ever-changing patterns and I think that perhaps kissing him is like flying and I can taste that elusive joy. If he kissed me, which he isn't. 

And that is when he steps back. His eyes are on me, morning dew and grass cool, and he says as carefully as anything, "You're welcome." 

And I am watching his back muscles shift as he quietly, calmly, inevitably walks away. 

(Springtime, that caged bird, sings to me of the sky. It is a melancholy tune.) 


	8. summer (shadow)

  
Part Eight : Shadow

  


He is waiting in the shadows, as expected, with his hands jammed in his pockets. It might just be a trick of the fading light, but I think he smiles briefly when he catches sight of me. "You came," he says coolly, strands of summer twilight woven in that hair of softest coal. "I didn't know if you would." 

The slightest shrug is tossed between us, and this time he smiles for sure. The shadows part at his grin. "Well, I did," I reply. 

"Good. Come on. They're over here." 

It is a ragged little party waiting for us, dominated by low whispers and hollow grins. Some I recognize; some I do not. They all seem to recognize me. It is hardly startling when Dumbledore approaches us and lays a hand on my shoulder, though I shy away from the comfort. All of their gazes are fixed solidly upon my every motion. 

"Draco," says Dumbledore, quietly. "Thank you for joining us tonight." 

Nothing seems appropriate, so I remain silent. What am I to say, _you're welcome_? 

"How do we know he's not a spy?" The voice hangs on the evening air, unidentifiable. 

He shifts at my side, cool as the starlit sky, dusky skin and crooked glasses and shadow-drenched robes. His voice, when it comes, is calm and reassuring like the midnight sea. (Your lips on mine, smoke and toffee and flower petal silk; why am I the intoxicated one? Why am I the only one reeling and melting and craving your taste again?) His hair is so dark and coal-soft that I think it must be a thief of light, stealing it away to bring the night on. "I will vouch for him." 

"And if you're wrong?" The same voice, or perhaps another, persists. 

Potter gives a pale, pale smile. "Then I'll pay the price." 

"And will we, too, pay?" 

"Enough." Sirius stands, the shadows tumbling around him as he moves towards us. I remember seeing his haggard face on the cover of the Daily Prophet, the words "Pardoned!" blazoned across the bottom. His eyes had shifted towards me, wary, suspicious. He seems more at ease now, resting one hand on Harry's shoulder. "I'll vouch for him too, if Harry trusts him." 

_But he doesn't trust me_, I want to insist, at least for Potter's sake, when his voice whispers again beside me and he says, "I do." 

"Just because-" the voice starts, once again, when Dumbledore intercedes. 

"Shall we begin?" he asks in a pleasant tone and the murmurs subside. "As you all know," Dumbledore says, "last week Azkaban fell to Voldemort's forces. The Dementors left to join him last year and we managed to either move the prisoners to another location or keep them from rejoining Voldemort, but a few weren't-" 

"You mean you killed them," a new voice says, accusingly. I peer towards it and find someone both different and stunningly familiar. Her hair clamors around her face like lustrous shadow, insidious curtain of obsidian. She is looking directly at Potter, not Dumbledore, and he is returning the heavy gaze. 

(Ice. Winter's ice, out of place in this summer twilight, a cold feeling of dread like melting ice cubes trickling down my back. Don't look like that, Potter; don't stare like you're falling into winter again.) He smiles, completely without feeling. "Yes, Cho. We killed them. They were murderers, Death Eaters. Are you sorry?" 

"You're a murderer, too," she shoots back. The rest of us seem frozen in the chill of their glares. "Does that mean we should kill you?" 

"Maybe you should," he says quietly. I can see the tension gathering around him, the rigidity of his figure. "But you won't." 

"Because we aren't all as heartless as you." 

His eyes snap and he seems about to say something potentially caustic, but Sirius places a restraining hand once more on his shoulder and murmurs something I cannot hear. Potter frowns and turns away. 

"We tried to keep it as little of a victory as possible," Dumbledore continues. His voice fades in my ears as I gaze at the older girl with empty shadows in her eyes. (My mother was so tiny and fragile in that hospital bed, the cursed Muggle machines beeping and blinking around her. An ethereal creature of mist and magic, before she yellowed to a monster and once more faded to smoke and shadow and nothing at all. What are you, Cho Chang? What diseases of grief and inward battles rob _your_ soul?) 

"Malfoy," Harry hisses, quietly, and I start. His voice never fails to intrude through my introspection. "I thought you came here to listen." 

"Are you listening?" I retort, voice low. 

He looks at me and can't resist a half-smile, then turns away. We are both gazing at Cho, I with curiosity and he with barely veiled resentment. And, I think, Potter used to look that way at me. 

"Hagrid is currently rallying the giants for a return strike in Wales." Dumbledore's words surface once more in my thoughts. "Remus is waiting with reinforcements, if necessary." 

I tune him out again. In reality, I don't care what pathetic fronts are being put on all across the UK. I really don't. I will follow Potter wherever Dumbledore insanely sends him, and that's what matters. Not Voldemort. Not my father. Not Dumbledore. Not this war. 

_Him._

"Dumbledore," a voice says, and I look up to Cho's pale face. "You haven't said anything about yesterday." Potter frowns and I can tell that he doesn't know what she's talking about, either. Sirius sighs deeply behind us and I glance up, startled into curiosity. 

"Yesterday?" His voice trails shadows through the summer sky with its dusky faded velvet. They are harsh trails, like the rents of a cat's claws in such fabric. Bitterly sarcastic, Potter is now, and the rest of us can do little but watch. "What happened yesterday, Cho? Did you accidentally step on a spider?" 

I wonder where and when this enmity has sprung from, but I really don't need to wonder. I remember witnessing their exchanges in the halls, the clipped and heavy sympathy in his voice, the almost horrified and trembling fear in hers. And then she is speaking again and there is little time for any of us to wonder. "Actually, Harry," she returns, voice wavering but just as cruel, "yesterday your precious godfather killed twelve people." 

The clearing is silent until he twists, the pain visible on his features, and stares at Sirius. (Transparent, you are, Potter. Always have been. Do you think I don't see the shifting expressions on your face? Do you think no one else does? Or am I just an expert at reading them by now?) "S-Sirius?" he croaks. 

"Oh, no," Cho continues, a crazy look in her eyes. She looks as if the words pouring from her mouth can no longer be stopped, no more than someone's long-pent tears can be repressed. "And they weren't just those murderous Death Eaters you love to kill. They were Muggles. Innocent Muggles, innocent bystanders. Just like-" 

"That will be enough." He does not raise his voice, Dumbledore, but his tone trembles with power enough to quiet us all. Cho subsides. 

"Sirius?" Potter whispers, this time so softly that only Sirius and I catch his words. "What happened?" 

"We were in London," he says, and all of us hang on his words like unshakable shadows. "It was late, not many people were on the train, and we were being followed." 

"We?" Potter seems the only other one able to speak. 

"Cho, Mundungus, and I. We'd gone to retrieve something from Dumbledore." His eyes snap, fists clenched at his sides, daring anyone to question what. I wonder, absently, silently, why Cho had gone. "Five Death Eaters were pursuing us. We had to create a distraction." 

"So you killed twelve people?" a voice demands, shifting from the shadows. Its owner is hidden. "Should have stayed in Azkaban." This is said lower, but still clearly. 

"No!" Sirius' voice rings through the clearing and I have to shift my gaze his way, a bit startled by the color flushing his cheeks. "Cho was knocked unconscious, she doesn't know what happened. If you want proof that I'm telling the truth, owl Mundungus in London. He's still clearing it with the press. Their leader, a man by the name of Gorman McDonald, had the nine Muggles held captive. He said - oh, sod this, why am I telling you? You won't forgive me anyway. Twelve bloody people died, yes. Now say what you like." 

I watch Potter watch Sirius turn away and feel, unexpectedly, my own pang of apology. Perhaps it's really Potter's, but it runs through me with the beat of my heart. "It wasn't your fault, Sirius," he says blindly. 

"It's over now," is all that Sirius replies with. And then, "We weren't going to mention it. Damn. Damn her for bringing it up." 

Potter does not disagree. 

Later, we wait together under the shifting canopy of late evening sky and the latticework of flowering trees. Sirius is talking expressively to Dumbledore, who is nodding quite coolly, and Potter has insisted upon my waiting with him. Only we aren't waiting. He's striding over to speak with the girl leaning against an opposing tree, and he's dragging me with him. 

"You didn't have to act so surprised," Cho says. She is not smirking as I might expect, and there is no satisfaction in her eyes. They are cold and dimmed, no flickering fireflies lighting up that midnight sky. "You already knew he was a murderer." 

"_Don't_ talk about Sirius that way. He is not." 

"Oh? We all are. We all are. Look at your hands, Harry. They're stained forever." 

"They are not," he says, fainter. 

"You can't deny it." 

"Why are you here?" Potter demands, my presence shifting behind him like a slithering shadow. Though I will never be he, never be any sort of reflection of him. His voice is raising, dangerously. "Why are you here, then? Why?" 

She shrugs. (Pale skin, haunted eyes, hair so dark it almost shines blue against the evening. For a moment they look the same.) "Where else am I to be, Harry? What else am I supposed to do? Maybe I want to give my life for the same cause _he_ did, and then everything won't be such a waste." 

"Cho," he says, and his voice is strained. "That was over four years ago." 

"Yes, well, it happens every night in my dreams." 

"You don't even know what happened!" he exclaims, and his voice is like the stars falling down and shattering into dust. 

"And you don't even know what you've become." Her eyes shift to me. They are not filled with bitter hatred, as most from Hogwarts would be, but instead blankly apathetic. (Her hair was brittle and faded amber, pale against the pillow. "I don't know, Draco," she had whispered, looking beyond me into the beeping red eyes of those cursed machines. "Why does it matter whether I'm still here tomorrow?") "You don't know anything." 

"Cho!" Someone appears from the shadows and I recognize her as one of the Gryffindor Quidditch players. I don't remember her name, though I think she was in Cho's year. "Come on," she says firmly. "We have to go." Her eyes slip for a moment to Harry's and she looks sorry, though she doesn't speak. Cho follows her wordlessly away. 

Twilight has shivered around us and its satiny breath is cool with a hint of seasons to come. "Potter, I'm-" 

"Don't." He is looking towards Sirius, who is still talking in a low but forced voice to Dumbledore. "Just don't, Malfoy." 

"Why do you hate her?" I ask, instead. 

He looks at me, finally, and his eyes are so shatteringly green that I am tempted to look away. "I don't. I don't. Isn't that fucked? I love her. I love her so much that I can't even listen to her voice anymore." 

"Haven't you got your feelings a bit mixed up?" I say hesitantly. 

"Have I? I don't think so. I hate you; I love Cho. It's simple, really." 

"Well," I continue, voice as flickering and uncertain as the fireflies jaunting with their tiny glow through the evening, "if it's all the same to you, then I think I'd rather be hated." (That look in your eyes, so painfully familiar. And yet not for me, those chilling jadestones so accusing I have to catch my breath. Maybe you're right. Maybe hate is apathy and maybe you feel too much. Only I don't think you hate me, either.) 

He smiles into the twinkling sky, voice all too carefree. "Have you had a good summer?" 

I am startled by the shift, but I only shrug. "I suppose. I went with a family friend to the States for a week. Father didn't have time to take me himself." I glance past him into the darkening trees and add, "A blessing, really." 

"I miss it," Potter says. "School, I mean. Talking to you. Sirius is busy a lot, but it's better than the Dursleys." 

"Well," I reply, and startle myself by the words, "you can always owl me." 

He nods, half-grinning. "Well, if you owl me back, don't send that damn creature of yours. It bites." 

"It was trained to." Pause. "And - well, thanks for saying what you said. Earlier." I wonder if it signifies anything that we never have to clarify anything for each other, always comprehending of what the other speaks. I watch him nod again, silently, and can't help myself but say, "Do you really? Trust me, I mean?" 

His eyes search mine for a long moment and before I can completely comprehend the moment, he reaches up and gently brushes the hair out of my eyes. (As ethereal and intangible as the dancing shadows and twilight touch, flower petals and indigo clouds and suspended breath.) "Sirius," he says very softly, "is waiting. I should go." 

I watch him leave and wonder if I will always be watching him walk away. 

"Mr. Malfoy," comes a voice at my shoulder, and I leap around to see Dumbledore's twinkling eyes. Trying to ignore the fact that my heart is racing, I look up coolly and wait. I am fighting back the urge to call him Professor and find that I have little to say. "I am overjoyed that you have chosen to join us." 

"Join? I've chosen nothing." 

He glances, ever so subtly, towards the two receding figures. Twilight has blurred them about the edges. "Really? We all make choices." 

"The right ones?" 

"No one can make the right choices all the time," he replies, though he is smiling at me. "That is for you to say." 

"I-" I glance at him, quickly, and realize that I have to know. "What happened to Cho?" 

"Miss Chang is, unfortunately, still a victim of staggering grief. She never recovered from Cedric Diggory's untimely death. It is a sad circumstance, yet she was very forceful when she demanded to join us back in her seventh year of school. She is an invaluable asset -" 

"She's also a bit off her rocker, wouldn't you say?" 

Dumbledore looks down at me in the gathering twilight and does not speak for a long moment. "Not everyone handles grief as well as you." 

And I don't know what to say. I don't, because there is something sincerely complimentary in his words, something smacking of acknowledgement and perhaps a twinge of respect. For the first time in my life, I believe, I catch the tiniest glimpse of Potter's undying admiration for the man. "They're terribly cruel to each other," I say simply. 

The famously twinkling eyes glint down at me, daring me to smile. "Much like another pair I remember at Hogwarts, always causing disruptions and fights in the halls. An _appalling_ number of detentions." Quiet, lingering amusement in that gaze. "Love and hate do not always live on untouched, you realize." 

"I realize," I say grimly. 

He rests one hand, ever so briefly, on my shoulder. (This time, I do not shy away.) "Until next time, then?" And he too slips away into the darkness, leaving me with my broom and my thoughts and my own shadows. 

I am standing in the dark embrace of an elm, cloaked in the knowledge that my father is off chasing Dark artifacts in Egypt. ("Of course you can't come, boy. I just paid for your visit to New York, and you better have appreciated it. Stay at home and do your homework, or something." Protesting was, as always, futile. "You're the sod who insisted on waiting to join us so you could become useful first," was the answering explosion. "Don't know why the Dark Lord allows, but if you bloody well want to become useful, then _get to it_!") 

So I fly. 

I don't know how I get there, but somehow my broom and I find our way to the familiar spot. (Two visits and it is imprinted on the black of my eyelids, branded in the haunted shadows of my soul.) I expect the grass to be withered in the heat and the marble worn, but the ground is softly green when I kneel and the curve of a wing glints eagerly like a slice of the moon. 

"I'm sorry," I say, flatly. Someone has put roses on her grave, new ones, unexpectedly fresh. Who could have - who would want - who - 

(But I need not wonder. Instinctively, like I know everything else about him, I simply _know_.) 

"Father," I continue, as precisely as if I am writing a letter, "sends his regards. Probably." 

What was it Potter had said? It was a feeling you got, simply by being here, something that spoke to him and his endless curiosity. Yes, well, I felt nothing but fatigue and itching irritation. "I am not," I tell her, or rather the cold gravestone that marks her, "a Death Eater." 

I do not add the melodramatic, "Yet." I do not look at the stone angel, frozen in the summer heat. I simply stand, look once at the darkened grooves of her name, and walk away. 

I take the flowers with me. 

If he will come again later and be surprised at the two identical bundles of dying roses on his parents' graves, I shall not ask. If he will act surprised when I owl him, if he will be bitten by my vicious messenger, perhaps I shall find out. If he will meet me in Diagon Alley while my father is still out of the country; if he will stand still in the light, turn round, and not walk away - 

The shadows had melted at the brilliance of his smile. His _smile_. And that embittered glare, bent on someone else. 

Home awaits, lofty and empty and lonely and cold. Smoke rises wistfully from its depths, streaming into the sky, and it rather seems like a soul fleeing its decaying body. (Only Malfoy Manor doesn't have a soul. It's had rulers and tyrants and lords, power dreams and riches and extravagancy, but never that.) Yet careening from the clutches of the indigo sky, eyeing the distant lights and marble pillars and overgrown gardens, I think for the first time that the sad old place looks hopeful. 

I am already composing words in my mind, seeing my own hand pen them onto the crispness of waiting parchment. And with my feet scraping the grass and my eyes tickling the sky, I walk into the chilling marble emptiness of that towering cage. 

Now is to wait. Wait for the scribble in reply, the owl skipping from cloud to cloud and back to my hands. Wait for the smile stolen from Cho, the smile that melts away all the shadows that swallow me, the smile that dissipates them into hazy emerald oblivion.   



	9. autumn (sunset)

  
Part Nine : Sunset

  


Late summer, early afternoon, and the door is locked. Pleasantly so, too, as the sun's warmth streams through the window and warms his hair beneath my fingers, dances over the sheen of his skin and the flush of his cheeks. 

"_Alohomora_," is the only warning we receive, before the door flies open. 

"Sirius," he wails, and I echo, "I _hate_ you." 

Sirius scowls: the figure I've come to recognize as easily as Potter in the last month, the only one of Dumbledore's "army" who has accepted me without question, the man that actually offers us dinner and reminds us teasingly about schoolwork. The man that ruffles my hair like a loving father. (I hate it when people ruffle my hair. But that doesn't change anything.) 

"It's my bloody flat," Sirius insists, tossing his wand and cloak on the chair. Remus follows him, dust-stained and weary, and behind them - 

"Snape?" Potter gapes, yanking the blanket from where I am huddling and leaving me yelping. "Er, Professor?" 

Severus Snape, infamous Potions Master of Hogwarts, only raises an eyebrow at us and turns away with what seems to be amusement twitching the corners of his mouth. 

"You," Sirius growls, gesturing wildly at us. "You stole my key this morning on purpose, didn't you? You thought, oh, we'll just lock Sirius out of his own home so we can have the whole bloody afternoon to ourselves! No thought that Sirius might possibly be bringing people with him, no thought that he might need to get into his own home, why would that ever cross your idiot minds?" 

"Bad day, Sirius?" Potter asks, sweetly. He reaches over me with one tanned arm to grasp his shirt, the last lines of summer's light trailing down his skin. 

Sirius shakes his head and beckons his companions past us into the kitchen. "Get yourselves in order and join us," he says sharply, and disappears. The door slams shut. 

He looks at me, the flush of autumn wine spilling onto his cheeks, and bursts out laughing. (It is a rare thing, his laugh, when so often I catch him haunting the corners and brooding with the taste of ash on his lips. It is only on these days, spiraling to an end, that his frowns relax and the lingering heat of autumn coaxes him into the sunlight and my arms.) His shoulders still shake a bit as he yanks the shirt over his head. (Sun has woven her chains to drape in your tousled cap, fingers daintily bestowing you with those lines of bronze and blood gold. The crown of autumn, and yet you seek the comfort of my shadows.) 

My fingers are fumbling at the buttons of my shirt, and he leans forward with a wicked grin. "Let me do that." Fingers tease their way to my neck and he yanks me forward unceremoniously until our lips meet and dissolve together. 

"Sirius sai-" I only halfheartedly protest, when he slides his tongue across my lower lip and does that sultry pout he is so innocently good at. We rapidly degenerate into a rumpled state of entwined limbs and fervent kisses. 

"_Harry_!" Sirius' voice shatters through the house. "If you aren't out here in the next thirty seconds, I'm sending Snape in!" 

Reluctantly, though with necessary haste, he kisses me once and disentangles himself. I follow him into the kitchen and note, to much amusement, that his shirt is on backwards. 

"-teenage boys, Sirius," Remus seems to be saying. "It's rather -" 

He glances up at me, into his tea, and stops. 

"Afternoon, Sirius, Remus," Potter says, that innocent smirk skipping through his words. "Er, afternoon, Professor. We were just -" 

"Mr. Potter, as far as I am concerned, you were just nothing. It would be a sad world indeed, were I to sink to indulging in the sordid details of your personal life." 

"They aren't that sordid," I say sweetly, affecting Potter's casual tone. "I believe _wholeheartedly_ in abstinence, Professor." 

Sirius snorts into his tea and Potter has the grace to go rather red. Snape only moves that disdainful glance to me. "Is that so? Do sit down, Mr. Malfoy; forced as I was into conversing with these two, we were just discussing you." He slides something across the table towards me. "And this." 

Potter moves behind me to look at the parchment. He rests his chin on my shoulder just to provoke Snape; nevertheless, the shivery comfort of his breath on my hear is not one I would willingly relinquish. "That's your Advanced Potions essay," he says, surprised. 

"We have a bit of a problem," Sirius admits to the both of us. "It's Cho." 

"When is it not Cho?" Potter hisses, and moves away. (No matter where we are, I can feel you; your presence in the room jars the clockwork of my body. Don't think I don't feel those eyes.) 

"Harry. She's coming to stay here." 

He is halfway across the kitchen and I can sense his sudden unease. His fists are clenched roughly. "No. _No_." 

"Alicia and Angelina can't deal with her anymore. They've tried, but she goes missing and turns up in the oddest places. They have jobs, lives; they can't watch her every meal and every moment. She's - Cho's not stable, Harry, you know that. She was making threats in a Muggle restaurant yesterday, ranting about being a murderer until the police took her away. We had to slip her out of jail. No one can keep an eye on her." 

"What makes you think you can do any better?" he challenges. 

Sirius looks towards my essay, then away. "That." 

"_That_?" Potter stares. "Sirius, it's irreversible, it -" He simply glares at the four of us, wrapping me up in the heat of his anger as if I am somehow involved in this plot, and storms without warning from the room. A picture of Harry and Sirius dangling crookedly from the wall jumps as his footsteps rattle the hall. 

"D_raco_," and Sirius starts warningly, "you will _not_ follow him. We need you here." 

"You can't tell me what to do," I mutter, but it is halfhearted and I sink into a chair. "So, what? You want to use my potion? Professor Kimball said it doesn't work." 

"It doesn't," Snape tells me snidely. "Have you learned nothing? One of the most difficult potions in the world, the actual process known to a precious few, and you want to adapt it from an old farmer's concoction? Half of these ingredients either react with or cancel out the others! And you can't go about simmering the mixture for three entire minutes! But," and his scowl deepens to negate the reluctant praise, "the concept is sound. You've done surprisingly well, considering." 

Remus shakes his head wearily. I notice the dust that has skittered across the tablecloth, shifting from his travel-stained robes. "Never was one much for Potions -" 

Sneered, from Snape, "As has been obvious." 

"-so let me talk to Harry." Exchanging of glances. "Really, Sirius." Three pairs of eyes follow his exist. 

"You are all," Snape says coolly, "barking mad." 

"Sirius?" He looks at me. "There - there really isn't an antidote, is there? No way to end the potion's effects?" 

He is searching his tea as if the answers will surface in the bitter taste and rising steam, if knowledge will appear from the depths of his cup. "Snape's working on it. But I don't know, lad. You see - well," and he shifts warily to Snape, voice bitingly hard, "why don't _you_ tell him." 

"Ah, yes," he says, eyes narrowed at me. Everyone believes that Snape favored me during school; in truth, he hated me as much as everyone else. I only managed to be good at what happened to be his favorite subject. "Mr. Malfoy, do you know the thirteenth use of dragon's blood?" 

I blink. "But-" 

"No? Two points from Slytherin." He isn't smiling, though that is certainly no indication of his mood. As if he had not just done something so potentially world shattering as make a joke, he carries on, frowning. "You see, there are twelve _known_ uses for dragon's blood. It is a potent substance and a dangerous one. However-" 

"We don't need the _Hogwarts, A History_ version," Sirius snaps. "In short, Snape's made changes to your potion. He'll brew it," this with a fixed look at Snape, "and give it to me. I'll combine it with her blood and take it." 

"Does she know?" I ask, more for Potter's sake than my own curiosity. 

"No. She's with Angelina right now." Sirius looks almost amused. "They're shopping." 

"And you'll be forced to stay with her for the rest of - for the rest of the war?" 

"She needs looking after." 

Snape makes a sound that almost sounds like laughter. "Oh, yes, that's you all right. Taking in all the world's misfits, hm? First Potter, then-" 

"I am not," I say haughtily, "a misfit. And I have a home, thank you very much." 

Neither of them disagrees. Neither of them agrees. 

"Dragon's blood helps to form extreme links between two people," Snape says, in the stillness. "Very few know this, for the potential of such bonds are terrifying. One can imagine, I'm sure. However, it only works when combined with the right ingredients, for the right amounts of time, and I for one am not going to reveal this information to _you_. It is a dangerous thing." 

"Yes, you've said that," Sirius growls. "We don't need a lecture, we need the potion. You can use the kitchen, if you must." 

"How generous of you," Snape sneers back. "I want no interruptions for the next hour. Now get out." 

Something bristles in Sirius' form and he stands. "It's my -" He stops, abruptly, glares at Snape, and then stalks out of the kitchen without another word. I shift in my chair and watch as Snape pulls ingredients from his pockets. 

"Have you something to say, or are you stuck to your chair?" 

"I - do you need any help?" 

"Absolutely not. Leave." 

Snape's curt voice, one I should be used to by this point, chases me from the room. Sunlight still yawns across the floor, but the only occupants are Sirius and Remus. He is nowhere to be seen. 

"You do know what you're doing, Sirius?" 

"I know enough to know we've no other choice." Sirius glances up wearily to me, hair as tousled as Potter's own. "What else is there? You and I know plenty about the cruel effects of war." 

Remus sighs. "Don't do anything rash." 

Sirius' eyes flash. (I watch the currents between them: the give and take, the ebb and flow. There are emotions and lives and worlds tumbling in their eyes, a novelty of sweetness and sorrow I have never seen before. The eyes of my mother were but mirrors and only reflected; my father's were polished like glass, if I remember correctly. I haven't actually looked in his eyes for many years.) "I am not," says Sirius, "a child." 

The other gives him a pointed glance. "No. You are not." 

Finding myself following their conversation like a spectator at Quidditch, I gnaw at my lip. "Is -" I begin. 

"He's sleeping." 

So I sink into the embrace of Sirius' old couch, its scent of cigarette smoke and musty clothes always tangled in my memory with the smell of him. (And his eyes tell no stories, act as no looking glass. They do not blind you with their careful shine. They simply reach out and swallow you, wrapping the world in tissue paper of forest and ocean and watermelon rind green.) I watch the sun caress her way across the expansive sky, watch the shadows elongate and merge, watch Sirius and Remus speak in monotone voices of flannel and down and cotton candy clouds. I wait. 

When Snape appears from the kitchen, cradling a tiny vial, we all start nervously. "Three drops of her blood. Shake, don't stir it - nothing should touch it after the blood is added. Is that quite clear? There's your potion. I've spent long enough in this cursed place." 

Sirius takes the vial, examining the contents. He does not speak, not for insult or for gratitude, so I do. "Um, Professor? Did my - did my mother - she -" 

For the briefest moment, Snape's gaze flickers. "Narcissa excelled at Potions," he says coolly, and turns away. The sound of the door slamming shudders through us all. 

"Age," Sirius comments under his breath, "has certainly not improved _him_." 

"Can't say as it's helped any of us," Remus replies lightly. "Some of us are still the fools we once were." 

Potter's guardian smiles dryly. "You're far too hard on yourself." 

"I was referring to you, Sirius." 

"Me? I can't imagine why." Feigned surprise, rueful grins. 

They argue like old friends, and neither glance up at me as I slip from the room. The carpet is rough on my bare toes and I walk it slowly, surprised to recognize its marks. (There, where he threw me against the wall after I insulted Sirius; there, where we spilled pumpkin juice; there, where the oil of my fingerprints left marks on the walls when he kissed me the first time. Strange, that I've drifted in and out of this home less than a month and made it a part of me.) 

"Potter," I call softly, shifting his door open ever so slightly. He is sitting up, eyes bitterly reflecting the sky. He does not turn until I move to sit beside him, looking at me as if just noticing my presence. 

"Malfoy." He looks, distantly, back out the window. 

For as much as has been said between us in the past two years, just as much has echoed in the silence. We speak in it now, eyes exploring opposite corners of the room, avoiding and evading and generally taking our time not speaking. (The silence drips on like butterbeer in its sunny warmth, seeping past our lips in gulps of quiet.) 

"Snape left," I finally manage to say, giving him the tiniest glance out of the corner of my eye. His gaze is still calmly fixed upon the wall. 

"Did he." 

"Yes." 

"Well." 

"He made the potion." 

"Oh." 

And we subside back into our easy silence, trading more than words can say. (He speaks in monotone, his words but sips of air and silent breath, and I with my stuttered gulps of sentences. Or perhaps we just trade glances and speak through those, paragraphs and rhythmic verses skipping between us. Silence, your words are as addicting as his are.) 

His gaze, at long last, stays steady with mine and he sighs into the melting sky outside. "Look, I - I guess I shouldn't have stormed out like that. But Cho. You know I can't handle Cho." 

"You'll be at school after next week," I remind him softly. 

"As Remus lost no time in reminding me. But Malfoy, this is the last thing Sirius needs. _The last thing_. Cho hates him, and yet, she-" He turns away from me and leans forward, eyes searching for something in between the glowing clouds. Early evening has turned the sky tones of pink champagne and orange sherbet, lazy tendrils snagging the curtains of blue. "She _likes_ him, too." 

I frown. "Am I misinterpreting you here, Potter?" 

"No," he says, carefully as anything, eyes still fixed away from me. "You heard me. Cho - and Sirius - were - are -" Faltering, he simply turns back and meets my gaze. I can read everything there, and it is a chilling tale. 

"I'm sorry." 

He snorts quietly. "Like hell you are. You're always sorry. Everyone's always sorry." 

I can't go to him when he pushes the walls back up like this, stacking brick upon brick with his words sliding like butter through the cracks. Yet no more can I reach to him through these lines, the sunlight glittering past me and around us in motes of lingering day. 

"You know," I finally say, voice subdued, "you don't have to call me Malfoy anymore." 

"It's habit," he returns, quickly. (Too quickly?) "You're just…_Malfoy_." 

"And you can't be P-" 

"No." He glances to me, the lines of sunset dying his hair the darkest crimson. "No, don't." 

"Fine." 

And he - Potter, _Potter_ - does not even react. Does not, any longer, look to me, but instead focuses on the distant sky. "If she lives through the war, I'm going to kill her." 

"You _what_?" 

"What else? I won't let her twist Sirius like this, not after everything. I won't let her do this, you hear? Not to me, not to my friends, not to my family." 

"They don't think she'll make it," I say, quietly, unsure of what else to say. 

"Who knows." 

"Snape's working on an antidote," I offer, yet again. 

Snort. "_Snape_." 

"Potter -" 

"You bloody created the potion, Malfoy. Or at least reminded them of it. You know what it does, all right? You know how irreversible it is, how strained the tie can become, how dangerous it is. Dangerous! You know what this means, you know how difficult this is going to be! Damn it, do you know what you're doing? Do you know how they all dismissed it, even Sirius, as a necessity?" He glares at me, gaze finally returning to mine, eyes burning with a strange ferocity. "What is it doing, Malfoy? What is this war doing to all of us?" 

I go to him, fingers outstretched, my own gaze wrapped tight with his. "I don't know," is all I can say. "Shh. Let it go. For now, let it go." 

His fingers, when they grip my own, are desperately tense. His face, though buried painfully in my shoulder, stays dry. And his voice is as cool as the ominous gasps of winter's light streaming into this tumbling autumn sky. "You think I can let this go?" he asks quietly. "No one can. We're all clinging to our pasts." 

"Even me?" 

"Especially you." 

I think about Cho and her nightmares of Cedric, her desperation for someone, anyone. The very thing she hates the most. (Ironic, is it not? That from hatred springs need? Tell me of it, Cho, and the conflicted things he makes you feel. Summer and winter and autumn and spring, tumultuous seasons of hate and love and need and want and despair and loneliness and oh, god, contentment.) I think about Sirius, the pain of his failures and the labels of the masses like shackles on his life, she just another chain keeping him from the agony of freedom. I think about Dumbledore, the world's eyes watching him as they always, always have. (Cages of silence, of fame, of grief, of pain and of fear and of hate and of love. What is it doing to us, Potter? It's setting us free. And that is the most dangerous thing of all.) 

I think about my father, his grasps for power, his meaningless attempts at something greater or something better, his own love-hate relationship with the world. His misdirected efforts in the footsteps of a thousand ancestors, struggling against the struggle to be anything else. The name Malfoy worn like a badge and polished like a trophy, but secretly pinning him to an identity of shame and failing power and foolish games that end too soon. (If the door is open and you cannot walk through, does that make you the wise man or the fool? Does accepting your fate, the fate laid down for you by generations, make you a Malfoy?) 

I think about my mother. My mother and her fragility behind those iron bars; my mother and her strength in the face of another world and its lights and its machines and the throbbing fear of death and death's freedom. I think about me, and my own shackles, my own cages, my own choices and hatred and love. 

I think about Harry - no, _Potter_ - and the ghosts of his parents haunting his footsteps, the legacy of his survival branded on his forehead and weighing on his soul. I think about Potter, yes, and the pain he brushes off every day, the way he slips through the world like a stray sunbeam that we all fix our eyes upon. 

And when the sun sets in its glory, its grace, leaving a sky still shuddering with all the colors of the rainbow and no traces of evening's grays and deepening indigos, no sight of night's defining black, it is all I can do to whisper to his skin, "Actually, I'm clinging to you." (His skin tastes like paper leaves and pumpkin juice and the mingling of despair with laughter and love, the way I imagine the sunset would taste were it a wine of the finest flavor.) 

He watches the sky, watches it without blinking those tears away, and he does not deign to answer.   



	10. winter (tomb)

To Moonchild: The obscurity of the time between Ch. 8 and Ch. 9 was intentional, though I hadn't meant it to be bewildering. Hopefully Ch. 10 and the rest of the chapters will clear things up better; thanks for pointing this out. Harry never had a change of heart, so to speak; subtle signals of his feelings have popped up, but the point is that the probably deceiving "love" they share in Ch. 9 is not as inwardly satisfying as it appears. You'll notice the distance Harry puts between them at the end versus the warmth they share at the beginning. (The sun is setting.) Their relationship in Ch. 9 is _not_ the culmination of the feelings they've built up thus far, and for that reason it is not the last chapter. The casual feel of their relationship in Ch. 9 is not typical of Harry and Draco, as theirs tends to be a hard, deep, ultimately lasting love. If this bit of foreshadowing was lost, thanks again for making note. By the final Ch. 14, I hope all questions can be answered. 

Flowers and worship to ShinigamiForever, the wonderful beta and consultant for this chapter, who helped work it into sense and gave me hope that it wasn't blathering trash. You are amazing. And again for my dear Christy, whom I love more than life. Ah, onward to winter.   


Part Ten : Tomb

  


Winter's chill owns my bones as I shiver and wait. And shiver. And wait. 

And wait. 

Beside me, Longbottom is as nervous as ever, shifting from foot to foot. Perhaps it is the cold, but more likely it is the fear. The stupid git fidgets like the very last leaves of autumn, dried and sopping wet and black, shifting beneath the snow. "Er," he manages, voice streaming across the thin air to my ears. "So." 

"_Please_," I drawl. "Your sniveling chatter is not helping the desolation here." 

This seems, unfortunately, only to further intimidate him into more nervous drivel. "You j-joined us," he manages, and I don't know if his stutter is caused by the cold or by me. "Against You-Know-Who." 

"Brilliant observation." 

"Im-important mission, this is, isn't it?" 

Dryly, "Sharp today, aren't you? Don't miss a thing." 

He seems to have built up a measure of confidence, for he is suddenly peering at me suspiciously. (The desolate backdrop of Azkaban is quavering behind him, sharp lines of gray sky and lonesome stones, a hasty sketch of charcoal and faded pencil shading.) "You're spying for Y-You-Know-Who, aren't you!" he finally questions, fright making his voice sharp. 

"Y-Y-You-Know-Wh-Who?" I mimic. "No, Longbottom. I'm not." 

"Then why are you here?" he asks, quietly shrinking from me, though the query is reasonable enough. 

Shrug. "Potter. Basically." 

"What?" 

Conversation, it seems, is inevitable. I sigh heavily. "D'you really think I care about Voldemort-" here he cringes, "or the quality of blood or Dumbledore's ridiculous morals? A miracle, eh, Malfoy's been converted? No, no, and no. I could really care less." 

He squeaks. "But - _you_ and - you and _Harry_?" 

Smirking, "Jealous, Longbottom?" 

At that moment, he nears, and I can feel him behind me even before I see the surprise in Longbottom's eyes. Can feel his breath stirring the winter air before he speaks, can sense him and his presence and his touch before it even reaches my wrist. "Oh, hullo, Neville," he says distractedly. "C'mon, Malfoy. Dumbledore wants to see us." 

I throw the gaping boy my most evil smirk as we walk off. 

"Were you teasing him?" Potter demands in exasperation. "Honestly, Malfoy, I don't know what to do with you sometimes." 

We near the cluster of people that is Dumbledore and his company. The grimness haunts Dumbledore's eyes and seethes all around us. This is no time for banter, so I swallow any comment I might have been tempted to make and follow him forward. Sirius seems to be involved in a heated argument with Dumbledore, yet again, and Cho is hanging uncertainly off to the side. 

"Harry, Draco," Dumbledore greets us, and even Sirius looks glad for the brief reprieve. "You are ready?" 

"Certainly, Professor," I say. 

"Good. Harry, come with me. We should be off." 

It takes but one look at Potter to know that he has lied to me (and strange that I believed him, he so transparent to me. Am I that much of a fool for his words, that eager to fall under his spell?) and is not, as previously planned, lingering about the entrance with me and casting his Patronus at all the Dementors to near. "No," I whisper, but the syllable is but a breath on the winter air and the wind carries it away. 

Sirius looks almost sympathetically at me and I suddenly realize the spark of their interrupted arguing. He must be going somewhere dangerous, then, for such a heated discussion. But then, what here in Azkaban, under the power of Voldemort, is not dangerous? 

"I can't believe you," I say to Potter, but my words are halfhearted at best. (Weak, faded, winter sky and dried out husks of flower petals. Almost silence, for the lack of response.) "You - why? Why can't I go with you?" I turn to Dumbledore pleadingly, though I have never seen his eyes that impenetrable and final. "Why can't I go with him? Why?" 

"Whining doesn't become you, Malfoy," Potter says, which takes a bit of nerve, as I've whined for things all my life. 

Dumbledore lays a heavy hand on my shoulder and his voice is the tone of funeral marches, the final thump of soil on coffin lids. Dumbledore never sounds like that. "We need you here. And Harry is needed elsewhere." (There are lines, spidery wrinkles beneath his eyes and over his forehead, shadows collecting in the grip of winter on his skin. He is old. Old in a way I never noticed, in a way any of us probably never noticed. Old in too many ways to count.) And then, for a moment, his eyes betray a glint of the merry optimism he is so known for, and he squeezes my shoulder. "I will take good care of him, young Malfoy, I promise." 

"It's not-" I begin, when Sirius frowns at me, the same regret pooling in his eyes. And I know how hopeless it is, how much time I am wasting, how much breath. So I simply turn to Potter and his arms and his lips and I try not to show how terribly much I care. 

"P - _Harry_," is all I can manage, fingers curled in the hair at the nape of his neck, insides twisting like melting glass. (So you turn me to glass and melt every bit of me, or shatter me to pieces, or at least know that you can. How strong is the steel you turn in my presence, how malleable, how immune?) 

"I told you not to call me that," he says, but kisses me back with such ferocity that I hardly notice. 

I watch him walk away beside the stooped figure of Dumbledore and the taller shadows of two strangers I do not recognize enough to remember names, and I realize that I don't know anything about the supposed plan. It isn't as if I've paid attention, but even still. I do not know what sort of opposition we face, what danger he is walking right into. I do not know if he'll ever walk out. I do not know - well, I don't know anything, really. I don't know what's been worth it, what I've wasted. I don't even know how Dumbledore plans to take Azkaban, or what it is that is being held there. What it is that is so important. 

"Draco." Sirius lays a hand on my shoulder, the same place Dumbledore's hand warmed a moment ago. Reluctantly, "I'm sorry. Dumbledore is right, though; we can't have-" 

"I don't care. _You're_ going together, thanks to the potion. I should have thought of using that excuse." 

Sirius' eyes flare, but he has the patience not to snap. Beside him, Cho's eyes burn razor blade bright, shifting into the shadows protecting Azkaban. She does not look at me. Sirius must be counting to ten, or probably one hundred, because it takes several beats of silence before he finally says softly enough, "Harry never needed a potion, Draco. He knows you'll follow him anywhere." 

This does not have the reassurance he probably meant it to have, and I simply turn away. "Yes, well. Can you say the same for me?" 

"Why don't you trust him? If you - if you care about him so much, why won't you believe that he actually has feelings -" 

"You don't know." My fingers curl around my wand and I wonder if I could catch up to them, were I to run hard enough. But all Dumbledore would do was look patiently at me and shoo me away, Potter's eyes haunting the shadows with their knowing glints. And he would watch me go. "Sirius, you just don't - we don't -" 

But no. Can I tell Sirius how I bought him drinks in Diagon Alley ("Galleon for your thoughts," he teased, and I wonder still if he remembered that long ago day), how I so innocently suggested we forget who we were for simply one day, a feat previously unaccomplished by the both of us, how we inventively rewrote history to a decidedly warped version for the tomes of homework issued by our young and sadistic History professor, how Potter didn't believe me when I kissed him the first time (second, really) and how I didn't believe him the next when he kissed me back? No, because Sirius wouldn't see it anyway. Sirius would see the laughter and the companionship we somehow slipped so easily into, not the same spite we'd known for so long. Not the distant look that steals Potter's eyes on certain days, the way he sometimes brushes me off, the way he kisses me like he is fulfilling something as regular as homework, or maybe something enjoyable but as routine as early morning Quidditch practice. (Some days he is restless as the autumn leaves, some days he can be warm as any summer night and I'll think, I'll hope, that I but imagine the rest. Yet it is these wintry days that push the worry into my soul.) 

Is Sirius right, and is it simply a fear of trust that makes it seem so far from real? 

"Well," he says, a bit awkwardly, "good luck." And he sets off across the rocky ground with Cho at his side; the two of them are a shadowy picture of blurred lines and doubts. Two fifth-year Hogwarts students, a girl named Fiona and her twin brother David, have been reluctantly admitted to our ranks and they are, in Dumbledore's words, under my care. 

Wonderful. 

"I know you," Fiona says to me, nudging her twin. His attention is focused on the movement in the shadows, the dispersion of others to various places around Azkaban. Brightly enough, Dumbledore and his fellow plotters seem to have told no one much save their own little duty. Brilliant, seeing as my mind will now be worrying about him for the rest of the night. Until I see him again. (Or his body, his dead body, skin tarnished with shadows and finally broken, icy green spirit shut off forever -) 

"A statement so obviously supported by the fact we've met before," I return sarcastically, turning my attention away from her and to the broken gates of Azkaban. Its rugged towers jut towards the circling sky. 

"That's not what she meant," David says almost protectively. I spot a flash of red near his collar and smirk: just as I thought, another Gryffindor. Exactly what I need. And now he presumes to read her mind? What are they, telepathic? (Or maybe, my mind suggests, intrusive as ever, they read each other's silences like you read his.) "We've heard of you." 

"Everyone talks about you all the time," Fiona adds brightly. "The best student Snape's ever had, or so he likes to say." 

"Snape gives me _compliments_?" I ask incredulously, drawn unwillingly into the conversation. It is not particularly comforting to know that one's name is circulating around Hogwarts on the tongues of disgusting little first years. 

David chuckles. For a Gryffindor, he actually hasn't annoyed me out of my mind yet, which is saying something. Better than the little snot Longbottom, whose burdening presence has been passed on to someone with greater stores of patience. "First time for everything, I s'pose. Even the Gryffindors talk about you. They all say you were the worst enemy of Harry Potter. Well, besides You-Know-Who, that is." 

"We're supposed to say Voldemort, now," Fiona corrects him gently. Then, unwavering gaze flicking to me, she adds, "We aren't scared of him." 

"You should be." 

"Are you?" David counters. 

"I'm not scared of anything." (Except green eyes and a disarming smile, fingers that trace the thin shadow of my ribs and could just as easily cradle and crush my heart. Breath that changes like the seasons, sometimes as heated as summer's humid breezes, sometimes as icily casual as the winter we race through now.) 

Fiona laughs, a sound eerily out of place in this desolate landscape. "Sure. They're saying you and he are together now. Is that true?" 

I raise an eyebrow. "Why ever would you think that?" 

"I don't know, maybe because we saw you passionately snogging just ten minutes ago?" 

I skeptically eye her decidedly _not_ innocent smirk. "You have a problem with that, Gryffindor?" 

Her smirk, now that I think about it, is reminiscent of mine. This is by and large not a comforting fact. "No, I think it's sweet. Hope he's okay. And I'm not a Gryffindor." 

"She's Slytherin," says David, delighting in the shock that paints my face pale. An echo of my words, "You have a problem with that?" 

But a chill runs through all of us and our wands jerk from our pockets, my words robbed in the sudden fear and cold fingers of Dementors. The next moments are filled with held breath and muttered spells, silvery light blooming against the stark sky and herding dark hoods away from us. All in all, I am impressed with the way they work together, impressed with their knowledge at their young age. We find six Death Eaters pretending to be Dementors, and Fiona strips them of their hoods (and wands) without mercy in her eyes. 

An owl shrieks past me and drops parchment on the ground before me. David grasps it before I can, earning a distinctly disgusted glare from me. He ignores it. "Harris dead, Longbottom and Davis missing. Kill them and come." Blinking up at me, he frowns. "Who's Harris?" 

"He used to be the librarian at Hogwarts," I say quietly, though my eyes are already slipping to the immobile forms of the hexed Death Eaters. "A long time ago. He was one of the best tactical men Dumbledore had, or so I heard." 

"Come where?" Fiona asks in turn, watching the paper curl into fire and then smoke and then nothing. David shakes his fingers, looking for burn marks. 

"I know where. Follow me." 

"It says to kill them," David reminds me, and I note how his wand is already held at hand. "You heard that, right?" 

I look. One's face is frozen in a mask of mingled disgust and regret; I remember his stoic gaze at our dinner table when he struggled to eat the oddly green pudding. (Mother liked to pretend sometimes that she could cook as well as our house elves, a rare and unfortunate mistake of hers.) I heard he cried like a baby at her funeral. 

I don't recognize all of them, but I've seen two of them with my father on numerous occasions and I think another might be called Gary. 

"Just leave them," I say, voice strangled. 

"_No_." Fiona whirls first, wand held out, and David follows her without question. I am stunned into silence by the coldness on their features, the firmness in their voices as they recite the words. I am further stunned that they know and can perform the curse, even I don't know if I can. Yet - 

"Now come on," Fiona says to me, slipping her wand back in her pocket. I lead them silently away and do not think about the corpses behind me, the flashes of green light resounding in my head like deathly flashbulbs that are reminiscent of his eyes. 

"Why?" is all I ask, when we are safely away. 

"Our parents," David tells me softly, "are dead. So's our little brother." 

"And that," says Fiona, "is all the answer you are going to get." 

There is one lonely tree struggling to live in the craggy rocks of Azkaban's shore, and beneath it is where we are to meet. I find Sirius and Cho there, her fingers tangled in his cloak, and his eyes fixed worriedly on the smoke streaming from the prison. I wonder, idly, how it feels to look on such a place after being imprisoned there for so very long. With them stands two unfamiliar men, a gangly young woman only a year or two older than I am, and three schoolmates of Fiona and David. 

"Sirius," I say, relieved, and approach him. There is blood on his cloak, blood specks on Cho's white fingers. "Where is he?" 

But Sirius has no answer. And though he opens his mouth to admit not knowing, there is a loud pop beside us and Dumbledore stumbles forward. Age never looked so fearsome; everything about him is drooping, weary, worried, lost, and yet his eyes burn with the brightest light of all. "Thomas," he snaps, and one of the men darts forward to hear his whispered words. Sirius leans into their conversation. 

I see the fear on their faces. I know. 

War isn't supposed to be about waiting. It's not, and yet half of what we do - no, more than half - is wait. We stare at the changing skies and the disappearing faces around us and all we do is count sheep, or some other ridiculous thing like that. We wait; we wait, and all we're waiting for is the frightening freedom of death. 

(The angel on her tomb is calling. He is cold, icy marble, and he too waits.) 

"I'm going after him!" Sirius bursts out, and my worst fears that need no confirmation are confirmed. 

"Sirius-" Cho and Dumbledore both try. 

"No." 

"Please," Cho whispers, and her fingers absently worry the bloodstained fabric of Sirius' cloak. She is not looking at him. She's looking at the ground. 

"_Listen to me_. Thirteen years I couldn't watch over him like the godfather I am and then four more when I was hardly able to be there any better than when I was locked away here. Don't tell me that I can't go to him. Don't tell me he'll be all right. Don't tell me that I have to spend more time waiting, bloody waiting! I'm going, and none of you are going to stop me." 

Dumbledore bows his head. "He _will_ be all right, Sirius. But who am I to tell you where you cannot go?" 

Sirius grabs Cho's wrist and I watch them, bitterly, as they race towards the fortress of stone. I shift forward, and Dumbledore arrests me with his flaming gaze. 

"No." 

"Professor-" 

"_No_." Yet again his word is final. (Am I the fool, then, locked in this cage of fear, cowed by the strength of his voice? Am I the coward, or is he the wise man keeping me from the suicide of this?) 

I slump against the tree, his eyes still warning me against moving. Fiona presses one hand to the crown of my head, a strangely comforting gesture that I nevertheless ignore. 

And I wait. We wait. Everyone waits, and our bones shiver, and I wonder idly why we can't do anything. What is going on in there? Dumbledore has gone, after leaving strict instructions to everyone that no one must go _anywhere_. Fuck, he could be dying. He could be dead. 

What are we waiting for? Freedom, or just another prison? 

Azkaban, right now, does not look so forbidding. 

"Don't worry," David says after what seems like an eternity but is most likely only twenty minutes. His lips are blue with cold. "Dumbledore's there, right?" 

"Dumbledore is nothing," I say back, without meaning in my words. Numbness is freezing my limbs and my thoughts, taking over with every passing heartbeat. David's voice is as distant as the faraway beep of Muggle machines, a rasping breath. 

"Do you think this is the end?" says a boy at his side, most likely another Gryffindor. He is nervously twining his fingers together. 

"What," I say, "is the end? Truly? Who gives a fuck about Voldemort? It's Harry who-" But they are all gaping at me, and I don't know what to say to make them understand. Why do I suddenly care if they do? Why do I want them to? Because he doesn't, or he doesn't want to, and he may never get the chance to? 

Potter. 

A flash of green light blooms above the crumbling line of Azkaban's spires, then another, and another. By the time all our eyes are fixed in horrified fascination, the last green lightning caresses the sky. 

_Harry._

No one reacts. You might think the world would stop, shudder to a halt in falling skies and Azkaban's falling stones, but nothing happens. Silence falls over our little company and none of us, _none of us_, meet the eyes of another. 

It occurs to me, ridiculously, that he has no one to be buried with. No fluttery saying to be carved into his monument, unlike his parents, and "The Boy Who Lived" is so hideously inappropriate of a grave inscription. 

_Harry._

And then, another pop, and two wearied shapes appear from the shadows. 

"It is over," says Dumbledore to our assembled ranks, and we look right past him. But his shadow does not speak. "It is over, for now," he says again, and there is something painfully still and grinding and harsh about his tone. "Go home. You're alive, you did your best; now is to mourn and to rest and to hope. But," and he looks at all of us, all mirth gone, solemnity darkening his eyes to midnight, "go now." 

And still he does not speak. 

And I do not speak, because I cannot speak. Relief and echoing terror and worry and panic and faint gasping elation at simply watching his chest rise and fall, imagining his heart still pumping steadily, is rendering me speechless. (And silence says enough, anyway. It always has.) 

I take a step towards him as Dumbledore herds off the others, and he collapses. 

I can't say a word, can't even say his name, but my eyes probably say quite enough. I trip my away across the dirt to him, to his huddled figure, and I pull him to me the way I've never needed to hold anyone else. (He is harsh color against the shadows and monochrome of Azkaban's stark background, too bright to be watercolor harmony but too real to be any child's drawing. We are playing catch again, tossing these silences between us, and all I want is to soothe away all the seasons that have brought him so close and pushed him so far. Power is not the only drug.) I breathe in his presence and can't bear to think of what else could be, what else was for a brief moment in the tumbling recesses of my mind. 

His voice is ragged, gaze dancing frantically for an escape. "I-" 

"Shh," I say with one arm around him, trying to relax the rigid steel tensing his neck. "Shh, it's all right now, just calm down, you're alive-" 

"Sirius." Choked, hysterical laughter trips from his throat and he seizes my shoulders in a sudden twisting of his body. There is a crazy, haunted look in those eyes. (Those eyes, that light that I thought I would never see again.) "D-dead Sirius; I'm dead…Sirius…serious…get…it?" 

"Potter." I pull him towards the base of the tree, pushing him into what is more or less a sitting position, but he only stares at me blankly. 

"He's dead." 

Someone else would know what to do. Someone else would find the words to say. But I only stare at him in what promises to be understanding silence, what might say more than anything else. 

"Cho's dead," he continues, voice empty. "And Wilson, he's dead too." 

I feel the warmth of his fingers almost incredulously, half expecting the brittle ice of my mother's. The unresponsive digits that felt waxy and limp in my own. But no, he is alive. "What," I ask, hesitantly, "was the fourth flash, then?" 

"This," he chokes out, and rips something with such ferocity from his neck that I am taken aback. He flings it at my feet, the tiny stone that holds so much of me. "This, Malfoy! This! And I'm bloody tired of it! I shouldn't be here!" 

"You're alive," I say, as blankly as he. As if I don't know what else to say. "You're alive." 

"Cho'd be alive," he says, mind wandering without direction, eyes staring unfocused at the sky, "if it wasn't for the potion." 

"What happened?" I finally ask him. 

"It doesn't matter." He heaves himself to his feet, unsteadily, and looks down at me. Again, he says, "It doesn't matter." 

Later, I will wonder why I let him walk away, and even later I will know that I had no choice. Now I simply watch his back and think of how many times I have before, now I simply whisper his name (Harry Potter, both words, like a compromise) and let him pretend he doesn't hear. 

_Harry never needed a potion, Draco. He knows you'll follow him anywhere._

Except where he doesn't want to be followed. Except where I can't follow. Except where he doesn't let me follow. (The marble angel trumpets his melancholy tune and calls for me, beckons. He knows. He waits. You can only cheat death for so long, when you give up your life in whispers of green to others. That, I think, is what my father has known all along, that when you don't grasp the punitive power you can, you risk others taking it from you. Only, my father cares about this. And I do not.) 

An empty Azkaban, really, is the only thing left to watch me walk away.   



	11. spring (song)

  
Part Eleven : Song

  


He is gone. 

Has been gone, really. For nearly a month. And that is why I am staring down Dumbledore's preening phoenix and yawning as I struggle with the pull of fatigue's eager fingers. 

My father's study, contrary to what one might believe, is always impossibly cluttered. In one corner you might find piles of haphazard books, in another a box of Dark Arts spells, Potions ingredients, unfinished letters, spilt bottles of ink, and any number of leftover meals and their subsequent dishes. It is like a separate home, distant from the orderly marble lines of the rest of the manor. Still, as used to that as I am, Dumbledore's office is too haphazard for me to even imagine making sense of it all. 

Dumbledore never really reminded me of anything save an old wizard, but at the moment he so resembles a mountain goat that I have to think my most sobering thoughts to keep from laughing. (My dragon hide and your goat horns, stubborn streak for stubborn streak.) 

Sobering thoughts. Right. Potter. My half-smile melts instantly. 

"I don't _want_ to," I whine for the sixteenth time. "It's not going to do anything but leave one or both of us dead." 

His eyes twinkle and I instinctively scowl. "You must work together, Draco; that is imperative. Otherwise nothing shall be achieved. If you won't consider it for your or his sake, do this for Harry." 

"Hey!" I glare. "I would think you, of all people, would play fair. Using Potter's name like a bribe, that isn't playing fair." 

The wizened old goat gives me an enigmatic smile, one that threatens to evaporate my remaining shreds of patience and makes me want to stomp on the floor like a spoiled child. "Aren't we all playing to win, these days?" 

"How does that make you any different from my father?" 

I expect him to tell me morals, or motives, or means, but he only watches me. "I'll leave that decision up to you." 

Silence. I twist my fingers and force myself to stop. Malfoys don't fidget._ I_ don't fidget. "Potter really looks up to you." 

Instead of responding, he folds his hands and says, "You do not call him Harry." 

Mumbled, "I haven't earned the right." 

"Oh? And how will you do that? Are you not friends?" 

"No." He raises an eyebrow at my hurried tone and I think of Potter and his smile as fleeting and contagious and impulsive as thirty-second notes. (Give me but a glance and I shall compose a symphony to the beat of your heart. Oh, Potter, where are you?) I glance at Dumbledore, or rather his flowing beard, as I have not the courage to meet his eyes, and whisper in an echo, "No." 

"Yet you trust him, don't you? Care about him, about his safety? You are here. I believe you would give all you have for him, Draco." 

I shut my eyes, but his words have wrestled their way into my brain and have granted my tongue a life of its own. My voice is the strangled croak of broken violins. I whisper, softly, to the eyes interrogating me from the backs of my eyelids, "I love him." 

"Then," Dumbledore says simply, "that is the best sort of not-friendship to have. Stay here, I shall send Mr. Weasley in. Can you two manage not to destroy my office?" 

"I'm not sure," I say truthfully, but he has vanished out the door. I visited the Headmaster's office only twice in my time at Hogwarts, and both times his chairs seemed enormous. I suppose I've grown. Changed, obviously. 

The door clicks and I can hear muffled voices. "…if I _must_," is all I catch, before he strides into my line of vision and I can't help but stare. 

I barely recognize him. I have to blink, wondering if this six-foot, lanky man with an earring and impeccable robes is truly Ron Weasley. My mouth, however, seems to have recovered instantly and says rather snippily, "I say, have you discovered a fortune buried under that ratty hole you live in? What's it called again, the Tunnel?" 

He stares at me, and his face twitches, but when he speaks he sounds remarkably unfazed. "Is that how it's to be, Malfoy?" 

Potter. This is for Potter. "No," I say quickly. "Old habits die hard." 

"Then I suppose I should take this opportunity to kick you to a bloody pulp, as the habit of that urge seems particularly immortal. Only I won't. Dumbledore says we must behave." 

It makes me uneasy to see how they all fawn over the old man, but I must concede a bit of grudging respect. And Weasley, how he has changed. "What's the matter with you?" I demand. "Aren't you going to leap on me and pound me into dust?" 

He laughs. Laughs! At me! "Is that what you came for?" 

"No," I admit, albeit reluctantly. "I came because I need to find Potter." 

"Don't we all," sighs the redhead. "What's it been, a month?" 

"Four weeks tomorrow." 

"Bugger. 'S not like Harry to just disappear like this! Haven't I told them that, a thousand times if it's been one? I said, he could be kidnapped. He could be dead. But no, all the Ministry cares about are taxes and commerce regulations and sodding Luciu - oh. Um. Your, er, father." 

I have never seen such an emphatic burst from Weasley, at least that coherently earnest, when he isn't threatening to rip me limb from limb. "You do care about him," I say quietly. 

"Your _father_? Not in a - oh. Harry! Of course I care about him, you git. Apparently the concept of choosing people you actually _like_ as friends is one unheard of in the Malfoy home." 

"I," say I, "don't have friends." 

Genuine curiosity, though reluctant, sparks in his eyes. "What's Harry, then?" 

"Everything." 

(Damn. Isn't today just the day for ridiculous, sappy confessions. And then again, he has disappeared from the world, slipping from sight if not from mind, and what else is there to say?) 

His face stirs in a spectacular grimace, but eventually he sighs. "You're a twisted bastard, Malfoy, and never in my life will I understand you. I'm not sure I want to. But as I was saying, the Ministry doesn't do shit. They think, oh ho, Voldemort hasn't taken over the world yet, Harry Potter must be okay. That's the only reason they care!" 

"You aren't the first to call that lot a bunch of selfish bastards," I say mildly. 

"Oh? And who else, pray tell?" 

Quietly, "My father." 

Silence, then gruffly, "Well, he's right." 

"Yes, and they are that." We trade glares, daring each other to disagree. I wonder if he's ever conceded to anyone that my father is right before. Working in the Ministry, he must hate my father as much as he always hated me. "And Dumbledore?" 

"Is doing his bloody best," Weasley says defensively. "He's not a god." 

"He certainly gets treated that way." 

"He's a great man, Malfoy. But you wouldn't know, would you?" 

"He didn't save Sirius," I say. 

"Neither did you!" 

Silence weaves notes around us. He stares down at me from where he stands and I realize that I am sitting, at a disadvantage that my father always warned me about. Earning a puzzled look from him, I immediately leap to my feet. "Neither did Potter," I finally growl, looking away from him. 

"He tried." 

"How would you know? You weren't even there!" 

"Yes, and I wish I would have been." 

"What, you're deluding yourself with the clever idea that if you'd been present, he'd still be around? Don't be ridiculous, Weasel. Your friendship can't count for that much." 

"Probably counts for more than yours does," he shoots back. Finally, one hand going wearily to his temple, he sinks into a chair. I would stand and look down upon him, keeping the upper hand in conversation or whatever my father likes to prattle on about, but my feet are too tired. So I follow suit. "Look, I didn't traipse all the way over here to argue with you. We're supposed to be working together, and that's what I plan to do, for Harry's good. You can bet if Harry wasn't involved, I'd never be talking civilly with you. I'd hoped never to see your face again." 

"Sincerest apologies, really," I drawl. "Working together for the same goal, hmm? Since when did you go and grow a bit of maturity?" 

"Probably when you were off getting cozy with Harry at the Academy," he retorts, voice poisonous. 

"Oh? Is this a recurring nightmare of yours, Weasley?" 

He looks at me for a long moment, and I look back. He really has changed, from the stubborn lines of his jaw to the deeper - and more controlled - pitch to his voice. (It occurs to me, ridiculously, that even standing he was taller than I was. Where's the advantage in that, Father?) "No," he finally says, and I'm startled yet again at the even tone in his words. "I've come to terms with it, the most I can, anyhow. I just regret not being able to see him as much." 

"I haven't seen him lately either, if that's escaped your notice." 

"Thanks for pointing that out," he throws back sarcastically. "Honestly, Malfoy." 

"He dropped out of school. Without notice. And he doesn't answer any owls. Well, except one, he said he wasn't captured by Voldemort and to leave him alone. After that, he kept on sending the letters back unopened." 

"And you decided to keep the fact that he _wasn't _in Voldemort's clutches a _secret_ until _now_?" he thunders, temper finally showing. "You absolute…_Malfoy_! We're all going out of our _minds_ with worry over him, and you just go about with this little bit of knowledge tucked away, never thinking to _reassure_ us that maybe Harry's bloody _all right_?" 

"Oh," I say. "Sorry?" 

"Fuck you, Malfoy. _Fuck_. _You_." He is pacing now, hands at his temples, distraught. The only pauses he takes are to send irate glares in my direction. "Dumbledore's a barmy bat for thinking we could work with you. Ugh!" 

"Sit down," I snap. "You're making me dizzy. Potter's not with Voldemort, that's the important thing, and now you know. I've just found out four days ago." 

"At which time you could have owled someone," he grumbles, but reluctantly sits. "You're impossible." 

"A fact Potter reminds me of every day," I reply. And he does, or did, doesn't/didn't he? I can hear his voice in my ears, affectionately frustrated. Or perhaps simply frustrated. How am I to know? How am I to separate the subtle nuances in his tone, a song I've heard only echoes of in the past weeks. Echoes. Dripping. Haunting. 

"Obviously not lately," he snipes. "Now what happened at Azkaban? That's why Harry ran off, isn't it?" 

"Nothing happened." 

"_Nothing_?" he echoes, and I hear his voice rise a few notes, skeptically, wavering. (A novice's composition, skipping with unease. Strings brushed with hesitation, nerves tuned too sharply, stretched to the point of almost breaking. The music is stuttered too fast.) 

"You know what happened! We all went off to our separate little jobs and got a bunch of people killed, Weasley! That's what happened, all right? So bugger off!" 

He regards me more pensively than I've ever imagined a Weasley looking. "I would have thought you'd know about death. Being you." 

"Well," I say, "I suppose the lesson is not to think, then." 

"Sirius and Cho-" 

"Died for a good cause," I recite. "They gave their lives for the war and our triumph against the Dark Lord and Muggle persecution. They sacrificed all they could for the equality and the well being of our posterity. Isn't that what we hear, hmm? Isn't that the propaganda your precious, beloved Dumbledore spits at us day after day?" 

"Dumbledore gives us reasons to hope, you bastard," Weasley shoves right back in my face. "He makes this war something worthwhile. He's what's holding us together." 

"Oh? Not Potter?" 

"Just because Harry's the only thing holding you together doesn't mean the rest of us are that pathetic." A beat and his face softens just a notch. "Dumbledore's holding Harry together, too. None of us, not even you, Malfoy, could get through this without Dumbledore. So I don't want to hear your righteous speeches about hypocritical words and meaningless deaths. I don't know why you're fighting for what you are, but some of us actually believe in our cause." 

"What makes you think I don't?" 

He smiles so very, very slightly. "Call it a feeling I have, Malfoy." 

"All right. Trust your intuition, then. I'll trust my own, and it says you're a poverty-stricken sod who likes to live vicariously through the riches and adventures of his best friend." 

"You do that," he says, refusing to take the bait. I wonder just what has changed him so much. Did the Weasel finally hit puberty of some kind? "Then remember that Harry's still missing, and we haven't done a damn thing about it." 

"_Harry_," I reply, "obviously doesn't want to be found." 

"Do you want to find him?" 

"Yes." 

"Well then." 

I sigh in frustration. "I've been looking. I will look. But if it leaks to the papers-" 

"Dumbledore planted rumors about special missions," Weasley says. "Hopefully, there will be no suspicion. Everyone's still busy erecting monuments and tossing flowers on every grave they find." 

"I sense bitterness." 

"Monuments and flowers," Weasley tells me, as if I don't already know, "don't bring people back." 

(You, Father, with your marble statues and her ostentatious funeral that you did not even attend. Can you buy life, then, as you bargain for everything else?) "Yes," I say, "I know that." He regards me evenly and I sense we have reached the closest thing to a truce we will get, stumbling over the brink of enmity to a tolerable sense of annoyance. "I've tried contacting him, as you know. It won't work. He won't reply until he's absolutely ready to be found." 

"Which could be next week and could be next year," he sighs. "I don't understand. Why would he just go running off? Harry's not one to shirk responsibility." 

"Obviously you don't know him as well as you thought." 

Something twitches, tightens, in his jaw, but he finally resigns himself to but a roll of the eyes and asks sarcastically, "Do enlighten me, then." 

"He isn't shirking responsibility. He can't get away from it. Nothing serious about this war is going to be resolved without Potter being there, and he knows it. He can't escape that, but he can escape us." 

"Why would he want to?" He eyes me suspiciously. "You didn't have some sort of pathetic quarrel, did you?" 

"One that would make him run away and hide? I don't think so, Weasel. He just can't - I think - bear the fact that we all must depend on him and he must depend on us. He isn't used to it, even after all the years he's been part of this world. He wants to do this by himself." I look around Dumbledore's office, the somehow orderly chaos that is warm enough to be comforting. Father's messes always have the feeling of being neglected and abandoned. "And if we," I continue, mentally altering that to a more singular I, "become too important…" 

"Are you saying I'm not important to him?" he jumps in, as single-minded as always. Honestly, is their obviously precarious friendship all that haunts his mind? 

"He's more responsible than you realize," I barge on, completely ignoring his query. "He just can't bear to dish it out to the rest of us." 

Weasley's suspicious gaze narrows at me. "You don't know what you're talking about." 

Shrug. "Maybe not." 

Silence. 

Finally, "It's bullshit, Malfoy. You make him out to be some coldhearted hero without feelings or attachments. How can you even claim to know Harry? He's a loving, caring, warm, friendly, conscientious, honest, brave, goodhearted-" 

"Are you done with that endless stream of adjectives?" 

"Fuck you. He's a person." 

(Eyes flaming, the background of Muggle normalcy wavering behind him, summer's fingers wrapped around him. His voice, raw with desperation, telling me how very much of a person he is. A fact he's needed to prove in the most elemental way, more than being the star of ballads and epics and lengthy love poems. A person who cannot be captured in words or notes or even stark black and white lines.) 

"Which I can see better than the rest of the world, the world that built him a special pedestal the day his name made all the papers. And," with eyes narrowed, "that pedestal isn't big enough for Potter and all his precious sidekicks." 

There is a long silence while he takes that in. Dumbledore's ratty phoenix eyes me carefully. (All right, perhaps not ratty. Its glorious plumage is, of course, the patented red and gold of Gryffindor. I always knew the goat played favorites.) "Fame does not go to Harry's head that way," Weasley finally says firmly. "I know that." 

"It's not just fame. When Voldemort strikes that pedestal to dust, do you think Potter really wants half the world to go plunging down with him? Besides. There's something in his eyes that makes me think - well, when that pedestal goes plummeting, Potter probably thinks he'll be less than ever. A nobody. Someone no one could be interested in, someone the world won't even acknowledge as a blip on its surface. Someone that, well, no one could love or befriend or care about, because that's what he was before, wasn't he?" 

Weasley stares at me. "You're full of talk. What are you, a bloody psychologist?" 

I shrug. 

"Well, you keep formulating your damn theories, then, and I'll look for him." 

"You have work." 

"You have school." 

We sigh at each other. "I think," I finally concede, "that overloading him with owls will just push him further away. Convince him that he needs the solitude to be as strong as he needs to be. Make sure Dumbledore keeps the world under the impression he's off working hard to defeat Voldemort - which, I suppose, he is - and I'll look." 

"Where will you start?" he scowls. "The world's a big place." 

"I wasn't aware," I drawl sarcastically. "Look, I'll owl you, all right? We'll," with a sour expression, "keep in touch." 

"Lovely," he retorts, the same delighted expression twisting his features. "We can be owl pals." 

I roll my eyes. "Good_bye_ now, Weasel." I don't wait for him to rise, don't wait for parting words, simply brush past him and out the door. (A large globe, its surface shifting with the minutes, is knocked to the floor by my hasty passage out of there. I do not look back. I don't think I look back for anything, except the harmony of _him_ in the chaos of the world.) 

I don't mean to wander Hogwarts, really. The damn place with its cold stone walls and contradictory warm laughter holds too many memories with which to taunt me. But I find myself haunting its halls nevertheless, the stray student pausing to give me a curious glance before passing on. 

"Draco!" A squealed greeting, and I am assaulted from behind as two slim arms embrace my neck. I twist, startled beyond immediate recoiling. To my surprise, a familiar auburn-haired girl is clinging about my shoulders. 

"Ergh, Fiona?" 

On second thought, her beaming face is not familiar at all. I was used to her cold eyes and commanding voice, the fiery chill that invaded her tone in notes of Avada Kedavra ice. Here is a schoolgirl seemingly untouched by the war, and she is laughing with her Slytherin friends. "What are you doing here? Are you going to be staying? Where's your _friend_?" 

To my even greater surprise, several other students are gathered about me by this time. A tall, dark-haired boy that I recognize vaguely from seeing in the common room during my last years of schooling is looking at me curiously. "You're Draco Malfoy?" 

"Er, yes?" 

"Wicked." He grins quite spontaneously. "We hear stories about you, you know." 

I make a face, detaching Fiona from my neck. "How bloody flattering. No, Fiona, I'm not staying. I just had a meeting with Dumbledore." 

"Really?" They back away slightly while Fiona stares quizzically at me. "Was it about-" 

I bend down to whisper low enough that the rest do not hear. "He's gone." 

"Dumbledore? But - _Oh! Him_! Oh no, that's awful." A look crosses her face, darkening her eyes. "Why didn't Dumbledore tell us? We could be helping! We could do something!" 

The other Slytherins look uncomfortable at her emphatic support of Dumbledore's side. I wonder if any of them are Death Eaters, how many of them have parents with the famed Mark. I wonder if any of their parents were among the group Fiona and David so mercilessly killed. 

"Fiona?" I pull her farther from her little group, backed against the corridor wall. "Do they know?" 

"That I work for Dumbledore?" she says, shrugging. "Pretty much. They know David does, but none of 'em like David much." A grin dances over her lips. "One of those hated Gryffindors, right?" 

"Don't they-" 

"Hate me? Exclude me?" Laugh. "No. We don't talk about it. We don't talk about much, really, except things that don't matter. You know: hairstyles and new robes and who's currently busy in the Astronomy Tower. Quidditch maneuvers and homework." Her voice lowers, not only in loudness but also in her tone, and I am reminded of the resolute girl who pointed her wand without hesitation and chanted those fearful words. "They don't understand, you know? They don't know how it is. So we don't talk about it. It's the same for David." 

"Ah." And I think I can see the haunted melodies weaving their traps in her eyes, chilling that laughing gray into icier orbs. I think I can see the bars evaporating around her, can see the doors sliding open. (You are the one that fears captivity, Potter. And it is I who fears freedom. The question is, which am I to you? And which are you to me?) "I - yeah, I know." 

"I thought you would." She smiles almost sadly at me. "I've got to get to class. I hope you find him. Let me know if I can help?" 

I nod. "I will." 

She sets off with her friends, smile returning larger than ever, the laughter ringing like a jocund and mocking melody. (It is the type of tune you whistle without thinking, the type of mask you wear without question. The cage you hold on to when the spring weather is unexpectedly chilly.) 

I start. The tall boy has returned, blinking. "Uh," he says, almost shyly. "Were you really - wereyoureallyturnedintoaferret?" 

I give him my most intimidating glare, wondering absently if he will tell them all how Draco Malfoy snapped at him when they all sit around the common room fire. "No," I say as firmly as possible. I can see it in his eyes that he doesn't believe me. "I was _not_." 

He shirks back, and then the faintest smile twitches the corner of his mouth. "Are you really shagging Harry Potter, then?" 

I look at him. Really look at him, the laughter in his eyes, the barest smirk, the familiar robes and Slytherin colored tie. I look at him and wonder if someday he will know what it's like, if someday he will hold his wand to someone else's throat - mine? - and whisper the words Fiona already knows. 

(I don't know why I care, but it gives me some vague comfort when I feel his eyes on my back as I walk away.) 

"Are you?" he yells, mirth in his tone. 

"Yes," I reply without turning. My voice is flat. "I am." 

Something tells me it isn't supposed to be that cold. I wonder what Potter would have said, faced with the same question. Something tells me that I am not supposed to feel this empty, the last echoing strains of his presence draining me of everything I have left to be drained of. Something tells me that I could be joking, laughing, trading banter with these former housemates who haven't tasted the pull of that hypnotizing song that tickles my ears. 

Fiona is right. They don't know. But they will, and that is the least comforting of all.   



	12. summer (glass)

Though, as always, this is for my dear Christy, this chapter especially goes out to sqeakyclean, a LJ friend that I wish I had the chance to know better. As a toast and unfortunate goodbye, though a futile gesture, I humbly offer this chapter. I confess to being swiftly and gladly consumed by this project; however, I can (almost) guarantee that the last two chapters will be out very, very soon.   


Part Twelve : Glass

  
  


The air in art museums is pristine, I think, like everything there. Clean and pure. Untainted. Here are the masterpieces hidden from war and hate and blood and love and everything threatening to corrupt them; here is the porcelain and ivory, the statues of unbreakable stone. But I am not here to find that elusive salvation in the glory of Botticelli's heavens. I do not seek the calm forgiveness of a statue or the open wings of a painted angel. 

I'm looking for Potter. 

It is but a whim, though now I will go on less. ("It's amazing," he had said, scratching his nose. "I didn't know people had that much talent. I mean. You know. Like, the great works?") I have been searching for months. And maybe I'm not surprised when I stumble into a room and find the same tousled head of hair and crooked glasses and rumpled clothing that has been haunting my dreams. But I don't approach. I stand and watch him watch the angels and think that maybe we exist in a tiny heaven of our own, suspended from the domed ceiling of the museum. (It is a heaven with gates of spiderweb steel and filigree lace, a heaven where angels can still sing their choruses to the painted sky without fear of being torn down. It is a dream.) 

"M-Malfoy?" Potter looks up, then, and his eyes trip over the unexpected figure before him that I make. Stumble like uncontrolled paintbrushes that line me with great strokes of black and gray and a bit of downy gold, a touch of dreaming silver and the barest hint of white. I am standing; the hands-in-pockets modern angel that haunts the art museum like a ghost, and Potter comes to me. 

"Where have you been?" I say, pushing back the urge to reach out and touch him. So real, he looks; but then, so do da Vinci's subjects. And they are naught but canvas. 

"Here, I suppose," he says dully. "Waiting." 

"What are you waiting for?" 

"I don't know. You?" He asks it like a question but his breath clings to it more like a life raft and he buries his head in my shoulder with his shaking hands and his wrinkled shirt and the tears that stain his cheeks. (So he is not an angel. Angels do not cry. But angels are not real, and Potter is real - so real.) I put my arms around him, run my hands reassuringly down his back and its absence of wings, and sigh. 

"Well," I say, as if I, too, cannot believe it. "I'm here." 

"Why did you come?" He looks perplexed and those lines of breaking green in his eyes are expanding to swallow me. "Why - why are you here?" 

I shrug. "I - Dumbledore sent me." 

"He what? He sent you? Why?" 

"I don't know." I reach to brush his cheek, reach up to touch the skin I've only really dreamt of feeling again. "I wanted to come, too, you know. We've been frantic." 

"We?" 

"Everyone. Weasley, Granger, all of your silly little friends. All of Dumbledore's people, the ones that he told." Quietly, "Me." 

Potter is silent. Around us, the angels sing, but the silence resounds in our ears and this time it tells me nothing. 

"You got my owls?" I ask stupidly. I take a step back from him, feeling the stillness in his body even while me own arms are wrapped around him as if I never plan to let go. (Clinging to him like smoke, or another sort of cage. Is that what I am to you, Potter? As unshakable as a Cho-shadow, chasing you towards inevitable death? Do you want me to go?) The tears have already dried on his cheeks, have already disappeared. 

He sticks a hand in his pocket and withdraws a few sheets of parchment. I take them wordlessly and flip the pages, seeing my own precise handwriting rise up at me. Sometimes hysterical, nonsensical, "…please, Potter, I swear if you come back I'll never call you by your first name again." Sometimes wondering, conversational, "…so I met with Weasley and barely recognized him; you never told me he grew…" and "…Professor Kimball asked about you, today. People've been avoiding it so long." Angry at times, where the quill stabbed the paper, shaking even in the precise lettering. "…why the hell won't you answer me? Is it Sirius? You had nothing to do with that, Potter, stop being such a selfish bastard…" 

I look up at him. "You kept them," I say, still stupidly. 

He shrugs. 

"You never wrote back." 

He shrugs again. 

"_Potter_-" 

"I suppose," he says, voice sharp like knives slicing canvas, razor blade wings of steel shattering glass, "now that you've found me, you'll want to take me parading back through the magical world and shove me up against Voldemort again." 

"That's Dumbledore," I return in bewilderment and worry and gruffness to cover the pain, "not me. I thought you knew that. I've never, _ever_, 'paraded' you around for your scar." 

He looks quietly at me. "No. You haven't." There is a bit of a silence, where our words trickle back to us from the vaulted ceiling. "You just march beside me, isn't that right? Malfoy?" 

"You don't want to go back?" I whisper. 

"That really isn't the issue in question." He pushes his glasses up his nose, runs a hand through that familiar tousled hair, and looks squarely at me. "I needed time alone. No thanks to everyone, I got it. Are you satisfied, now that you've found me?" 

Silly, it seems, like a dog with his bone. Once he's found it, then what? Did I compare Potter to a dog? No, he doesn't have the sloppy joy spilling in his eyes anymore. He doesn't have that silly grin. He isn't the one loping after people like they might be something he's lost. "If you are." 

"And if I'm not?" 

"Then." I shrug. "I won't tell Dumbledore I saw you until you want me to, Potter. But you aren't getting rid of me." 

He looks at me for a long moment until I have to wonder if he's scrutinizing the painting behind me rather than my face. His eyes are focused, piercing, chilled. Green smoke. "Tell me about school," he requests after what seems like half an eternity. I follow him back to the couch he had occupied earlier, sit beside him with too much space in between. "Tell me about school," he says again. 

"Um. We actually made Veritaserum. You know how Snape always said it was too dangerous to leave to the hands of pathetic students like us?" He nods without speaking. "Yeah, Kimball basically gave us the same speech, then proceeded to let us do it anyway. I got perfect marks." 

"When don't you?" he says, and his voice is quiet and without inflection. 

"When I work with you." I watch his face for a smile, a hint, any kind of crack in the mask, and am rewarded with an enigmatic stare. Perhaps now isn't the time for jokes. "Weasley and I get along tolerably now. All because of you. I guess you really are Miracle Boy." 

My mouth seems to be out of my control. But that does not matter, because I don't think he's really listening to a word I'm saying. Instead he is watching the paintings and the figures balanced in flight. "Potter?" I question. 

"Look," he says, too patiently. "I don't know what you expect me to say or do. What, shall we go throw a jolly 'Welcome Back Harry' party? I don't think so." 

"Say or do what you bloody well want to, Potter. Don't look to me for expectations." 

"That's the last thing I'd do." 

"Then who are you looking to? Weasley? Dumbledore? The Ministry fools?" He is silent, and so I barrel on. "Your ruddy parents, Potter? My mother's gravestone? Cedric Diggory? Cho? Sirius? The hordes of dead? These, these angels, these fucking angels, this fucking untouched paradise? Is that your fucking salvation, Potter? Or is your _fucked_ _up_ salvation the moment when you face down Voldemort and whip out the two words on the tip of your tongue for years? Then whose expectations are you li-" 

"Malfoy," he says simply, and it is enough to stem the tide of my rising hysteria. I am ranting. I am ranting, and he is ice. People should not be ice in summertime, unmeltable angels or no. 

I stare at him. He stares at me. Or maybe I stare over his shoulder and he stares over mine and we both see the suspicious security guards at the same moment. If I hadn't yelled - If he hadn't _not_ - 

"Let's go, Malfoy," he says quietly, glancing around him as if his paradise has crashed. (Are they glass walls around you, Potter, here, that I've shattered? Or am I but another of those walls that ensnare you while they grant you solitude? Did you come to me to lose something, instead of finding it?) 

"Let's go," he says again, and there is melting sand in his voice. 

"Where?" 

"Anywhere." 

"Wait," I say, though we have already stepped into another room. This one is full of paintings depicting dancers embracing their partners of shadow. Their heads are thrown back, city lights woven down the planes of their necks, frantic colors tossing their skirts and far-flung limbs into a frenzy of motion. (Cinderella, the wings on her feet too fragile to last.) "Wait. There's something I want to show you." 

His gaze is disinterested, but he does not resist when I take his hand. From my pocket I pull the wrapped key and fumble for the activation. Specific Portkeys are not as easy to come by lately, but my father obtained it for me last Christmas. 

Potter does not even blink when we settle in the starkness of our library. He does not look the slightest bit disoriented, nor is he confused. "That's a lot of books," says he, as calmly as ever. I wonder absently where he has been staying. 

"You know," I say, almost under my breath, "if I hadn't found you today, I don't know what I would have done. They've all been - _I've_ been - crazy with worry." 

He looks at me. (Weighing words. Did he ever do that before?) "I know." Silence. "Why are we here?" 

I do not answer immediately. "You like art?" I say instead. 

"It's sort of something I never got to experience. I - I like how you can lose everything if you look hard enough." (Yes, Potter. You would.) "Do you? It's rather _Muggle_ of you, is it not?" 

I smile as we tramp up the stairs. (He is here. He is breath in my ears and blurs of motion out of the corner of my eye, green and black and tan and colorful, always colorful. And if this gasp of cinnamon and pine and emerald light ever fades, how does the world keep on spinning? Goddamnit, Potter, the world really does revolve around you.) "Don't make such assumptions. Do the Mona Lisa's eyes move?" 

"Not actually," he begins, when I push open the door. He stands stock still, wondering eyes trained on the picture. Is that emotion in those eyes? Is he riveted by its beauty, or the surprise, or by me? "Malfoy, that's-" 

"The _other_ version of the _Annunciation_." 

"I was going for amazing, but yeah." 

I want to reach out to him, but I stay where I am several steps behind. The angel in the painting gives me a sad smile, wings drooping ever so slightly. Fabric rustles. "It's yours," I say quietly. "Er, if you can figure out how to get it out of here, that is." 

His eyes are on me. His eyes are on me, and they burn. "Mal-" And he drops off, steps forward, and drags me to the equally piercing heat of his lips. 

(Melting glass. Heat glow, lines on the backs of my lids, and when I look all I can see is forest fires of green. How many angels fly to fall?) 

For the first time I think I see the trails of Summer's languid kisses and he is not a frozen, faceless angel, but Potter. There is light in his eyes like the pieces of sunlight leaking through the veins of leaves. A smile is almost tickling those softened lips as he holds his wand up, trying to consider spells to move the work. His cheeks are flushed the barest sheen of dawn. 

And then there is a startled, "Draco?" behind me, and Potter is rigid steel. 

Steel, unmanageable and grinding, lips that just caressed my own now handing out a different sort of shiver. And even though I close my eyes and stumble backwards, I shall never forget the waves that wash my world green. (Did I wish for that once, verdant and monochromatic peace? Do I wish for that now? Be careful what you wish for; fire is hot, Draco. Really? Avada Kedavra is green, Draco. Really? Father is dead, Draco. Really? Really? 

_Really?_

Yes. Really.) 

There must be smoke somewhere, suddenly, because it is stinging my eyes. I have to blink away the protective watering that results, hovering on my lashes. 

One pair of eyes is lost in the shifting painting, glazed and distant and forever cold. Another is vibrant, desperate, burning. Both sets echo the ringing fear in my own. 

I give a strangled gasp, and even I do not know whether the word tangled in my throat is "Potter" or "Father." 

He will not look at me. 

"Voldemort didn't kill Wilson and Sirius and Cho," Potter whispers. I think his eyes are tracing the creases in my father's robes, the shadows on his ash-pale skin. "Wormtail gave me my wand back. He stood behind me and held my hands around it. He said the words himself and I felt the power rush past me. Wilson was the first." 

"But you didn't say it," I whisper in return, refusing to recall how 'it' leapt from his tongue only a moment ago. (We trade words, pass them over his corpse as easily as we have over drinks or homework or chessboards or empty air. To and fro, Potter; catch.) 

He whispers back. "I wanted to. After Wilson, how I wanted to." 

I look at him and think, maybe that's why he didn't die the first time. Because he is Avada Kedavra incarnate. Because his soul throbs with these words. Because- 

"Malfoy," he croaks. "When Wormtail turned the wand on me, I nearly said it myself." 

I watch the expressions flicker and transmute on his face. Silence streams between us in arrows sharper than words. "But, the stone?" 

"Yes." 

I think of it, added quietly to the clutter of Dumbledore's desk when no one was looking, wobbling like a feeble sign of respect to him. Maybe he has noticed. Maybe not. And owl post. "When you find him, keep him safe," Weasley had reluctantly charged me. Oh, and don't I try. But can I _really_ protect him from what even I can't touch? Can I truly save him from himself? 

"Potter." We are both looking at the painting, where the wind is stirring the cloth. I smile a bitter smile that seems more at home on his features. "Welcome back." 

"Some party." His eyes are breaking and I think, the world is going to fall in. "Malfoy," he says at length. "You keep it." 

"What, the body?" A weird little laugh shakes my frame uncontrollably. (Father. Oh, Father. Shall I build you a marble angel to trumpet the world away and make music of glass windchimes and grating laughter on your grave?) 

"The painting, Malfoy." 

"I gave - I gave it to you." 

He is not ice; ice melts in heated days like this. No, he is a glass - or perhaps steel, for he does not break like me - imitation, a statue like those collected on the distant premises of this manor. Cold. Immobile. But he is not shattered, unlike my father. He is not dead. "You need it," he says. "Everyone needs something to lose themselves in." 

I say, with my eyes on the aquiline curve of my father's nose, "But I have you." 

"That doesn't count," says Potter. He doesn't explain why. And I don't ask him what his something is. 

Even when we walk down the stairs, afternoon pasting shadow wings on our backs, I am four steps behind. But I suppose it doesn't matter. What matters is the presence lying still behind me, gathering dust in that room until the house elves come to take it away. What matters is the presence I am following before me, the presence of which I cannot let go. 

I lose my thoughts in the curves of his back and pretend, pretend in the absence of my father's ghosting breath, that we can fly away into the sky of watercolor blue and go back like stray paintings to the haven of the museum's peace. Only we cannot, can we? We can never. 

Be careful what you wish for, the walls whisper to me. Fire is hot, Draco. 

(And glass melts.)   



	13. autumn (steel)

I don't _do_ happy-ever-after mindless fluffy into-the-sunset sap. Well, on rare occasions, but not now. Don't say I didn't warn you.   
  
  


Part Thirteen : Steel

  


"I look forward to your spending the weekend down at the cottage next month; the autumn leaves are lovely. Your excellent marks in school come as no surprise, and I'm sure you'll make a capital Auror. I know your parents would agree. I was just in New York on business and recalled our trip there, what was it, over year ago? Strange how time flies so quickly. Just as many pigeons there as before." 

Potter looks up at me, eyes creasing in annoyance. "Dear god, does it ever end? This has got to be the fourth page." 

"Third," I correct. 

"Well, it's all scribble anyway." 

"One would think you wrote in neat little legible lines, as impossible as you are at deciphering this scrawl. Give it here, I'll read it." 

"No, I'll do it." He skims over the pages, flipping irritably to the fourth, and finally crows, "Ah hah. 'Sentiments about such allegiances are best left unwritten, Draco. However, let it be said that the Malfoys have always valued revenge. Ah, but you knew that. Do write back.'" Potter raises an eyebrow at me. "Then he dithers on for a few more paragraphs about the weather and your father's greatness and other things like that. Oh, look. His wife is pregnant." 

"He doesn't have a wife," I say, lying back on my bed and crushing a few rolls of parchment as I do so. "At least, not that I remember. He was always on after my mother." 

"What is it with your family and infidelity?" Potter demands, rolling his eyes. 

"Is that suspicion I detect?" 

He snorts. "Right. I know all about your mad liaisons with Mulligan and Mulligan while I was gone last year." 

"Ah, you didn't hear about the little affair with Jason Handel? He's quite the popular one, you know." 

"Don't flatter yourself. Come on, we'll be late for History." He yanks his bag from where it lies, drooping, in the shadows of his bed. I follow him out the door and wonder why he always looks away after a moment or so. And he never laughs. Only smiles, faintly, and that is as reluctant and slow as bending bars of metal. 

I am still stuffing the wad of parchment in my pockets while we cross the grounds. A few of the older boys are swooping above us, enjoying the crisp autumn afternoon and its air currents on their broomsticks. "So anyway," I tell him hesitantly. (His eyes are as sharp as blades and as cool as they have always been of late. He only nodded when told he was on probation for having missed so much of school, only shrugged when lectured and warned he would have to make it all up. But they let him back in, their beloved Boy Who Lived.) "I can probably get the location out of him next month when I visit. It would have been sooner, only none of them trust me." 

Cool eyes sweep over my skin like the air whipping past us. "Should they?" 

Shrug. "I'm a spy, and I know I'm a spy. They're guessing I'm a spy. Preston won't, though; he's always been a trusting fool. Old family friend, too." 

"Who's quite liberal with his words." 

"He likes to keep me updated. He's been sending me letters since, oh, fifth year. They're interesting. Sometimes." 

We are not actually late, making our leisurely way into the heated building and its classrooms. A few new students hurry past us with the impression they will be punished if late. If they have Kimball, they probably will be. "So, an old family friend, huh?" 

I nod. 

"Would you kill him?" 

I blink. "Excuse me?" 

"I'm just being curious, Malfoy." 

And it has been such a long time since he was truly curious about anything. "If I had to," I say, carefully. "He is a Death Eater. As we've established." 

He looks almost amused. "War equals necessity, Malfoy. People have to die." When I don't answer, he shoulders his bag more carefully and frowns. "They do." 

"I know." We are at the door of the classroom, and Professor Engle is eyeing us with the suspicion that we do not have our homework completed to the best level possible. "And," quietly, "they have." 

Some days I wish he would react. Honestly, Engle gets more of a rise out of him than I do. "True," is all he says, before he slumps into his seat with me sliding in beside him. (Is it so much to ask, wanting a reaction? Is it so much to demand, hoping for a moment of meltdown or malleability, at least something besides the cold bars that taste like bitter iron?) "Would you kill your father, then? If you had to?" 

"He's dead, Potter." 

"If he wasn't." 

I open my mouth to answer, though what answer is forthcoming I'm not sure, then watch his eyes snap suddenly towards the front of the classroom. "Shh," is the only warning he need whisper, as Engle calls the class to order. 

"Your homework," he snaps, cracking his knuckles. It is a habit he has, among randomly throwing books in the middle of class. Not as if there's a chance we're on the verge of drifting off, not in this class. "If it isn't sixteen inches, I'll incinerate them all." 

His voice is, and always has been, steel that wraps around your brain. It reminds me of Potter's. (Barbed wire tasting like blood and rusted iron on your tongue. Bitter. Poisonous. Addicting.) 

I tear a bit of parchment and carefully take out my quill and ink on the pretense of taking notes. Potter carries my scroll towards our professor at the front of the class, ignoring the others that jostle with him. 

_If I had to, yes, yes I would._

He is not startled when he returns, only mildly curious. I watch the play of shadows over his cheeks. He writes beneath my script, messy handwriting as irregular as ever, and slides it surreptitiously under my elbow. 

_Had to? And what qualifies as such necessity?_

I frown, quickly jotting down a quote on the blackboard. Engle is roaring about mercantilism, import bans, and our general incompetence at everything. 

_What the hell, Potter? He's already dead. It doesn't merit discussion._

The next answer is quick. _Humor me._

_If Dumbledore asked, then._

He studies it for a beat before bending his body over the parchment. I follow the motion of his quill with my eyes, watch it dart across the page and watch the ink cool. Part of the m has smeared when he passes it to me. 

_If it was a matter of his life or someone else, then what? Someone like, say, Ron?___

_For Weasley? Ha. Of course not._

He frowns. Not upset, though, perhaps simply puzzled. You forget, Potter, I am not and never will be you. 

"So therefore, the Enlightenment was in fact but an outgrowth of our own recently enlightened culture, and sparked controversy within the magical world. It can be claimed that-" _Wham!_ He slams the 3,592 page textbook down and we all cringe. "Randolph, if you would kindly focus on the lesson at hand? Yes, yes, thank you ever so much for your time. As I was saying, there is still much debate over whether or not we are to blame for the Muggles today. If we created the monster that turned to terrorize its creator." 

_So, you of the famed Slytherin ambition. Who would you trade your father's life for? Because you know he would have traded yours._

I write, simply, as if hellhounds snap rusted jaws at the heels of my mind, _Yours. Otherwise, I don't know._

"Tell me, Jean," Engle hisses, advancing on the French boy staring morosely at his book. "I wonder, do you think that Warrick the Wise did the," mockingly, "enlightened thing to do when he shared these stunning new thoughts with his Muggle companions? Should he have collaborated on invention ideas? Should he have stoked the allure of the scientific while messing in magical troubles of his own? Should he have torn down the gods, Jean? Should he have?" Careful now, his booming voice a whisper. "Should he have burned at the stake, burned in that magical fire?" 

_How about Engle? Would you trade for his life?_

I jerk my head to look at Potter, for traces of sarcasm, but he is the epitome of attention. Jean is studying his book with the same sort of burning diligence. 

"Anyone?" Engle challenges, gaze sweeping up and down the rows. "Since Jean seems speechless today - ah, Christa. Yes?" 

"Prometheus gave fire to mortals," she says, wiry glasses perched on her nose, and the expression on Engle's face is that of a lion about to pounce on unsuspecting prey. 

"At what price?" he roars. "At what price? Shall we find our eyes robbed daily from us? Should the magical world be food for Muggle scavenger birds? Are you out of your mind? Are you suicidal?" 

_Potter_, I write, the cries of carrion birds in my ears. (Follow him, with your hungers for withering flesh. Follow him, for green springs from where he steps, and it is not grass.) _What games are you playing now?_ And then, as an afterthought, I write very carefully, so precisely it might be type, _And were your parents also alive, would you kill them?_

I watch his face while he reads it, watch it grow pale. So he does react to me after all. "-can't mean you support these bigoted ideals," a girl is heatedly crying. Her name is Lisa, or Lee, or something similar. She reminds me of Fiona, almost, but she is a nobody, a Mudblood, who stomped in with her righteous Muggle dreams; people of that nature fail to impress me. "Surely you don't believe in that Pureblood rubbish?" 

"The point that your mind is trying so desperately to miss," Engle says sharply, "is that my opinion does not matter. Why should the thoughts of the likes of me influence you?" He slams his fist on the desk, unexpectedly. The windows rattle. "You, your minds! You! I want _your _opinions!" 

Potter will not look at me. 

"Sir Malfoy," Engle drawls. "We haven't heard from you of late. Do tell us your esteemed opinion. A hypothetical question - we all know of the war, the struggle with You-Know-Who." Eyes flick to Potter, and mine follow. (Yes. Direct your death painted gaze away from me, or trap me in its walls.) "Say that he attacked the Muggles openly. Would you vote to aid them, even if it meant sharing our secrets? Our magic?" 

"No." And now, now he looks at me, now! With his eyes searing bruises onto my face. "And invite certain persecution, resentment? No. There is a reason the likes of Warrick were burned alive." 

"Yes, because the likes of you pull the strings," mutters the girl whose name might be Lisa. 

"You would kill who knows how many Muggles because you're scared of being called names?" Potter speaks out, and I know he speaks to me. "You'd let them die." 

"Us or them!" I hiss. 

"Bu-" Lisa begins. Potter angrily cuts her off. 

"No wonder the Malfoys are such an old name. They're cowards." 

"Don't talk to me about death, Potter! Don't you dare! Don't you even try to tell me about sacrifice and death and necessity. Don't, Potter, because I know you know-" 

"What do I know?" he shoots back. "What do I know, Malfoy? That people die and we can't do anything about it but let them? That sometimes necessity outweighs the care we feel for people, and that's something I had to learn? Something you taught me, Malfoy? Something you showed me with your condescension and your constant reminders of Cedric! That's right, you showed me death, and you showed me that freedom comes before everything else. It's never better in the bloody cage, b-" 

"BOYS!" Engle's voice thunders through the classroom. (Eyes like a hawk, hooked nose, voice as sharp as talons as they latch onto us.) "If you cannot conduct yourselves civilly, get out. You add to the lesson, or you leave my room." 

Potter rises in a rustle of fabric and paper and tanned limbs. His look tells me to follow, and we stomp from the room with the echo of the slamming door. 

My breath is knocked half a world away as I find my back stinging against the wall and his hand on my throat. "You have no right to talk about my parents," he growls, and his voice is as heavy as clattering chains. 

"And you have the right to ask about mine? 'Would you kill your mother? If you hadn't sat and watched her wither to smoke, would you douse the flame anyway? What about your father, would you kill him too? Would you like it?' Well, I think I do have a right to ask, Potter. Would you hold your wand to your father's throat and whisper the words? Would you push those flashes of green at your mother? Would you let me, would you stand there mute as I-" 

"Shut up," he hisses, but there is no need, as his hand wraps like iron around my throat. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" 

(Vise of steel encircling me, not crushing, but there. Like a handcuff, a chain, shackling me. But it is you who is bound, isn't that right, Potter? Tied to me, because I'm your cage.) 

He releases me slowly, staring at me as if he does not know me, as if I am a ghost. (Fitting, Potter, is it not? I do haunt you, though I am not yet dead. You've buried me in the depths of your eyes and when I breathe, it is only your green.) "Malfoy," he says softly, one hand reaching to brush my cheek before he steps back and I lean heavily against the wall. 

"I'm sorry," I tell him. It is the wrong thing to say. 

"Malfoy," he says again, harsher. A grating mutter. "I want you to kill something." 

"Excuse me? Are you out of your mind, Potter?" 

His eyes dart past me, over the shut classroom door, down the empty hall. At last they alight on a tiny speck and brighten. Jerking out his wand, he whispers, "_Stupefy_!" and the creature pauses in mid-flight and drops to the ground. I watch him kneel to look and I reluctantly crouch at his side. 

"You are crazy. Honestl-" 

"Say it," he cuts me off, voice like ringing blades. (On guard, Potter. Ah, but you always are.) "Say it! You know you want to! Say the words." 

Stubbornly, "I won't." 

"It's a bloody fly. I don't think its death will weigh on your conscience forever." 

"_No_." 

"Malfoy!" 

"I won't do it." Our robes brushing together, I wait in the silence until he turns to look at me. "What are you playing at? We're skipping out on History, kneeling on the floor, staring at a stunned fly. I think you've lost your mind." 

"Does it matter?" Bitter laughter. "I'm still their savior." 

(Theirs. Theirs, and mine, in such a strangely different way it's almost black and white. Hang your head down on your gilded cross and whisper to me, because there is blood on your lips that I crave to taste. It is not enough to shine down on me like you do the rest of them; I want your tears, your sweat, your toil, your blood. And it is not yours to give, is it? You are owned by the world.) 

He looks down, into the tiles scuffed and faded with the passing of many dirty feet. When he looks back up at me, I can feel my insides clench like the sound of a lock clicking open. 

"Say it," he whispers, more of a plea than a command. "Please." 

"Why?" 

Shiver. "I need you to." 

Shiver. "I can't." 

He reaches in my pocket, withdraws my wand, and presses it into my curled fingers. He is so warm, as if the sun has passed over the rest of us and burnt its image onto his skin alone. The heat thrums through his bones, while cold steals mine. "Kill the fly, Malfoy." 

I step on it. 

Voices that have echoed in my ears for too long, voices that haunt my dreams and even my waking hours. Father, in the library, with approving laughter over his shoulder. And I was but a child. Fiona and David, their words but snaps of steel traps, clicking into place. Potter. 

_Avada Kedavra_, they all whisper to me, and my tongue refuses them. 

"Malfoy," he growls, torn between irritation and laughter. "You bastard." 

I shrug. 

"You did that just to spite me." Then, looking at me, "No, you didn't. You did it because you didn't want to. Why the hell not? It's a fly." 

"It's the principle." 

His grip is steel around my wrist as he grabs me and drags me to my feet. "Is it? That's funny, coming from you. _Malfoy_." My name is spoken with purpose, intently, as he faces me and pulls my wand - with his hand covering mine - to the base of his throat. Green locks around monochrome gray and swallows it, drowns it in color. "You know," he whispers. "You're the only one I'd let do this." 

Sharply, "Why? Because I'm a coward, like the rest of my family, as you said? Because you know I'll never say the words?" 

The smallest, careful smile plays across his lips. "Because you're you." 

At that moment, the door flies open and the others pour out of the room, giving us brief glances before hurrying off down the hall. Lisa stops by us as Potter releases my hand and I withdraw, clutching her books. "We're supposed to read pages two forty two through five hundred," she offers, and hurries off with the rest. 

"Thanks, Lee," Potter calls out after her. He turns to me with his unreadable gaze, nods once as if recognizing something about me neither of us wishes to say, and turns back to the laughing and jostling students. 

I walk beside him, but there are bars of steel between us. (If I reach through them they may clamp to my skin, steel traps and rusted bitterness. I do not know if it is to keep me out or keep him in. Is it his cage, then, or mine?) 

The silence drapes around us like so much haunting smoke, and I wonder if I am the coward for not trying to reach out. Is survival so important? 

"Hurry up," he calls to me, having pulled ahead. Frowning, "Aren't you hungry?" 

So I follow him, as I always do, with the remnants of death clamoring around my soul and stuck to the bottom of my shoe.   



	14. winter (breath)

If you have reviewed, are reviewing, or will review in the future, I love you. And for sticking with the child of my soul (aka, this) for so long, I love you anyway. Love, love! You all rock. 

Don't act so surprised. There was plenty of foreshadowing. Just go and look for it. More will be explained in the following, erm, follow-up.   


  


Part Fourteen : Breath

  
  


Dampness has soaked through my socks and into the chilled flesh of my toes, the snow clustering in melting clumps on the edges of my robes and dusting across my face like the coldest kind of kisses. No, I take that back - Dementors kiss colder. And sometimes, so does Potter. 

"You came," he says, almost surprised, when he yanks open the door. White lights sparkle faintly out of the corner of my eye, remnants of last week's celebrations. (Winter's fireflies, lighting the night sky like so many starry reflections. Colors are gaudy, but the pale white is a different sort of beauty. The kind of lights overwhelmed in evergreen eyes, swallowed into the darkness like the night gulps down its own jeweled ornamentation. Wistful.) 

"Fearfully," I retort. "I was afraid some Weasleys might still be lurking in your closet, or something." 

"The closet?" But he steps back to let me in, revealing starker furnishings than Sirius had maintained, a more bare living space. The lights are the only remaining signals that any celebration at all went on for Christmas; no leftover ribbons and paper, no new presents lying casually on tables, not even a tree whispering its wintry secrets to the walls. 

I settle on the couch, the familiar musty smell wrapping me in its arms. "I'm sure you had an interesting holiday, what with Granger and the whole Weasel clan swarming your flat." 

"And yours was better, out with Jackson at his cozy little cottage? What did he do, feed you Death Eater paraphernalia for Christmas dinner?" 

"It's Preston," I say. "And I only went for two days. I spent the rest of the time at the Manor." 

"Which must have been so much better, that empty house filled with talking portraits of dead people." He looks down at me, curiously, with unreadable energy in his eyes. "You're not hungry, are you? Dinner might be awhile. Want a drink?" 

I watch his fingers fumble with the bottle, watch the stream of white gold bubbles burst into the glasses. I wonder if they were Sirius' glasses. If he drank from them with Cho, both nervously fidgeting on the couch as I am now. If they toasted each other that Christmas, that last Christmas before they both died. 

"What are you thinking about?" he asks, settling down at my side. 

"Death." To paraphrase. 

He smiles, faintly, bitterly. "Me too." 

(Take a sip of this fermented moonlight, let the shine of Christmas lights tingle your throat, and lick away the last lingering taste on your lips.) I watch him sip, swallow. He looks to me as I speak. "How so?" 

A noncommittal shrug. So he brushes me off like one stomps away the snow, melts away my questions and querying looks. And then, hesitantly, "How did we get here, Malfoy?" His voice, for once, is quiet. A slow whoosh of fire, not a roaring blaze. Effervescent emeralds swallow me. "I mean it. I hated you. I mean, I do. But-" 

"In an entirely different way?" 

He blinks at me, then lets a reluctant smile bleed its way across his lips. "Malfoy," he says tiredly, "I hope you know that to the day I die, you will always be a mystery." 

"Thanks," I reply, voice as dry as the last ghostlike leaves skittering on the ice. He laughs, humorless, face creasing. 

"It wasn't a compliment." 

I shrug. "I know." And yet I am gray, or colorful, and you are your string of ethereal fairy lights and angel wing snow. (Must you revert to our stark colors, our opposite black and white like chess squares? Balance out your world, hide beneath your veneer of palest dawn.) We stare at each other for a moment, each of us focusing on the space just above the other's eyes rather than directly at them. "Potter," I finally say quietly. "I have it." 

It is not that his eyes light up, it is that they fix so intensely on me that everything else is but a blur. "Your father's friend Preston?" 

I give him the enchanted map, the tiny dots blinking, and our fingers fumble like those of hormonal adolescents. "It's only good for another five days. He is, obviously, wary of being caught." 

"As well he should be." Potter smiles, much like the archetypal big bad wolf. "This past year, he's grown weak." 

His fingers wrap around the glass, lift it to his lips, tip it wryly in a halfhearted toast, and he sips. I watch the movement of his throat as he swallows. "You're going, then. With the map." 

"You would rather?" He looks amused. 

"No, but - You'll take reinforcements, won't you?" 

"Oh, because storming into Voldemort's stronghold with fifty Aurors won't be noticeable. Dumbledore, probably, he'll come. He can arrange it." 

I look at him. Really look, at the same eyes and tired countenance and tousled hair that haunt me and have haunted me for so long. And I wonder how tired he is of holding up that mask, of keeping the world at bay time and time and time again. How tired _I_ was. How long I've watched him like this, and how distant he's made himself stay. 

It might be all me, but I think he leans in at the last moment so our lips meet a hair more forcefully than I'd meant. I can taste the champagne, faintly sweet, like fermented summer nights bottled to drink in the new year. After a moment, he pulls away, his breath still dancing with mine. "You've changed," he says softly, enigmatically. "From the boy in the shop, I mean." 

Dryly, "Maybe because I was eleven then and I'm twenty now." 

He only looks at me in faint surprise. "I've known you that long. I didn't realize." 

Something like smoke, but sweeter, lingers about him. We are crushed together now, limbs and gazes and folds of fabric colliding. "Well," I shrug, almost apologetically, and he can feel the movement against his shoulder, "for the majority of that time we abhorred the mere sight of each other." 

"What makes you think I still don't?" He looks at me, but a half-smile flickers over his face. "You know," he says softly, with one hand outstretched to his champagne glass, "I never would have wondered. You were simply the Slytherin Enemy, until that day your mother died. And you tried to look so together." Painful laughter jars his lips. "If it wasn't for her, everything would be different." 

I add to his quiet laugh, an underscore of bitterness. "Is that what you mean by death equaling necessity?" When an answer does not come, "What prompted all of this nostalgic recollection, anyway?" 

Pause. "You. You should know what." 

"Should I?" Silence throws her blanket over us. (The heat of his skin, the pounding of my heart. Life. Oh, let us wear away the hours under this quilt of muffled falling snow, let us sink into this wordless comfort and forget. Only we never do, do we?) 

"I won't let you take the glory," he murmurs to my shoulder. "For leading us to Voldemort. I won't let you steal all of this." 

"As if that's likely. Come on, Potter, what are you on about?" 

But he only looks at me, distantly, as if he sees someone else reflected in my eyes. "I don't know. I don't know if I can keep on like this." 

Breath barely a ghost of hope, "Like what?" 

He looks at me with blankness in his eyes. "Never - never mind." With a sip to wash down his words, he turns his gaze from me and sends it out the window. I let him avoid me and rest my chin in the curve of his shoulder, simultaneous sighs escaping the both of us. 

"Cages," he says suddenly, loudly. "Don't you see it?" 

"See what?" I reply impatiently, feeling stupid or perhaps just left out. 

"Everyone bars themselves up in cages." He sounds almost angry. "They turn life into their prison, shackling themselves to everyone they come across. It's pointless, you know, and they do it anyway. These stupid ties." 

"Some people call it love." Carefully, noncommittal. 

"Some people can't afford to." 

Silence, yes, weaving ribbons through our hair. The lights in the windows beckon me, winking with their fleeting brightness. (Too bright to sustain any presence save themselves.) "I could kill you now," he whispers to my skin. "I could." 

"Would you?" I murmur back, but receive no answer. "Why, then?" 

He peers at me, torn, yet unyielding. "You could be on their side still. This map could be a trick. None of them - unless Dumbledore does - even trust you." 

I ask, in an echo of words seasons before, "Should they?" 

"No." 

"Should they trust you?" 

Green fragments, leveled at my heart. "No one should trust anyone. At all." 

A beat. "I don't believe that. Why else would you?" 

"It's dangerous, Malfoy. I'm dangerous. You remember Cho, don't you? The potion, the goddamn potion. It was a death sentence." 

"And you blame me?" 

"No, I blame - I don't know. Life. The stupid ties we take on ourselves. Love - _anything_ - shouldn't be allowed to do that." (Will death set you free, Potter? Is that it? Because when the words were on your lips, it was not light that I saw, but color. Color, and its opposites swimming in your eyes. 

Will death make you a hero? Or will being a hero make death? Is there a difference?) 

"Why else?" 

(Hand half-raised to my cheek, eyes glittering: an angel. Or at least a Christmas decoration that tries.) 

"Because I don't need this," he mumbles with his lips moving but the barest sound escaping. "I don't need you." 

"You're proving a point? That's ridiculous, Potter. Why?" 

"Because I need to do it." 

"No." 

"Because the world needs me to do it!" 

"No, why? Really, why?" 

Urgently, but softer, "You need me to do it." 

And more quietly, yes, "Why?" 

"Because you're the - the only - because nobody else - because I love you." 

And a high-pitched voice squeaks nervously behind us, frightened, "Dinner is ready, Master. Should Dobby be laying out the table, sir?" I watch him beam happily at Potter as if he is the messiah. 

Without moving his gaze from me, voice low, "Are you hungry?" 

"No." 

"I didn't think so." He turns slowly from me to look at the house elf, says quietly, "Set only one place tonight, I think," and returns that gaze to me, the gaze that slides down my back like twin blocks of ice. His eyes are unreachable now, unreadable to the point of emptiness. A green void, spilling down into the shadows he won't let anyone touch. 

Desperately, roughly, "Say it again." 

He blinks at me, carefully, as if there is something in his eyes he must hide. Those luminous orbs like winter fog raising in between the trees. And sometimes I want to kiss his eyelids shut. "No." 

"Potter-" And a seizing desire to speak it, his name, his real name, that my tongue clenches in the back of my throat. Choked, almost, "Why?" (It is a question I am continually asking, slipping through my teeth and over my lips and into the air, time and time again, inevitable, like the ticking of seconds. Why? Why? I never have enough answers.) 

"Because I'm a liar," he replies, his growled answer softening to a muffled hiss, the soft thud of snow upon snow upon snow. When you step, then, you find below it all the ice that pulls you down. "Because-" And, "Why am I explaining this? Why do I have to?" 

Why? Because. Why? Because. 

(Patterns. Black and white, green and gray, winter and summer and spring and fall. Malfoy. Potter. Harry. Draco. Patterns.) 

"You don't," I murmur to his collarbone, finding that somehow his hands have tangled around the back of my neck and he is pressing his lips desperately to the line of my scalp where my hair parts for his touch. "But I want - I want to know why you - what you're so afraid of. What you're looking for, if you're lying now. What you - what you want out of love." 

He is cold when he presses his hand to my chin and pulls my gaze up to his, almost shivering as if the snow outside is burning through his veins with frigid desperation. Seeking the light, the warmth, the way we all do. "Guarantees. Someone that won't leave me, that won't try to save me and instead just abandon me. Someone whose love I don't have to share, who'll forget me after so long. Someone who won't tie me to danger, to _them_. Someone who won't betray me. Someone who won't see me in the fame that tracks me. Someone who won't - someone who won't-" 

"You don't know how it goes, then, Potter." 

"Don't I?" 

"You don't sign a bloody contract. You don't write your name in blood. You don't sell your soul." 

"Maybe you should." 

"Maybe I've tried." Silence, where the low hum of cars and the falling night and a few clatters in the kitchen settle between us. "Maybe you haven't." His hand in his pocket. His eyes like solid ice interrogation. His breath sending shivers down my spine. "You want something no one, not even I, can give." 

He smiles almost sadly. "That's why it's never better in the cage." 

"Sir," Dobby squeaks from the kitchen, "Dobby is watching sir's food get cold, Dobby is." 

"I don't mind," he says, perhaps too quiet for the house elf to even hear. Perhaps he has his fingers clenched around his wand, something to hold onto when everything else is falling loose. Perhaps. Perhaps words echo in his mind, taunting him. Perhaps. "What would you do if I were to kill you?" 

(Silence, sweet silence, wrap me in your arms. In your wings, your halo of Christmas lights.) "Love you anyway." 

I think of the sight of him, years ago, jostling with his friends down on the school grounds. Watching him lie back in the snow, arms outstretched, eyes pressed to the stars, making an angel mold for himself. Spreading the wings, the snow soaking into his scalp and down his back, dreaming somewhere else. Probably, if he had lain there long enough, Winter would gather him to her touch and lift him to the stars. 

"Malfoy," he says patiently, painstakingly, as if I'm missing some axiomatic principle right in front of my eyes, "It's death." 

"Yes," I say, "I know." Quietly, inversely, "And what would you do if you killed me?" 

"Love you anyway." 

Quietly still, "But?" 

I can't read his expression. I can't see past the silence streaming from his eyes. But I hear the raggedness in his voice, the sudden desperation. "But I live - we all live - in a fucked up world, Malfoy, and all I've learned is that the nature is for survival. Do you get it? It doesn't matter one bit if it's the Muggle or magical world, we're still screwed for being-" 

"Human?" 

He isn't looking at me now; he's looking beyond me at the frigid snowscape outside. "I need out. I need out of here, damn it!" Dazed, "Wouldn't everyone else? Wouldn't anyone? Wouldn't you grasp for the freedom if you could?" And then, his voice tearing like jaws of steel, "I forgot, you won't let yourself. After all, you're just like them." 

I can't respond to that, simply cannot conjure the words. Instead, voice too calm to tremble, the world spinning in painful monochrome emerald, "Your eyes are green." 

He looks as if he is going to retort sarcastically, but something glitters in his eyes and his mouth loosens, lines slipping: just for a moment. "Malfoy-" 

I catch his hand. "It's Draco, thanks." 

"All right. Draco." And he leans in and kisses me, so deeply that I think time might stop. 

His breath is like frost: a cool silken whisper of champagne and darkness. I can feel his lips move against the pounding of my pulse. (Dry skeletons frames rustling, autumn colors a masquerade of grandeur, crushed beneath the ice. Lost, melting into oblivion, colors trampled into black and white.) "_Avada Kedavra_," his lips murmur to my heart. 

I watch as the light and my breath fade like morning mist into the tears of those green, green eyes. (I am shivering. So cold.) 

It is winter again.   



	15. follow up

  
_So, so you think you can tell_   
_Heaven from Hell,_   
_Blue skies from pain._   
_Can you tell a green field_   
_From a cold steel rail?_   
_A smile from a veil?_   
_Do you think you can tell?_

_And did they get you to trade_   
_Your heros for ghosts?_   
_Hot ashes for trees?_   
_Hot air for a cool breeze?_   
_Cold comfort for change?_   
_And did you exchange_   
_A walk on part in the war_   
_For a lead role in a cage?_

_How I wish, how I wish you were here._   
_We're just two lost souls_   
_Swimming in a fish bowl,_   
_Year after year,_   
_Running over the same old ground._   
_What have we found?_   
_The same old fears._   
_Wish you were here._   
-- Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd   


Why do I consider this necessary? I wanted, first of all, to completely clarify that I fully intended to end Two Lost Souls this way. If Part Fourteen yielded up any questions as to _why_ I chose such an ending, I wanted to make clear my reasons and dispel any confusion or disappointment some might harbor. These are by no means full explanations of this fanfiction, and only skim the surface. Feel free to read as deep into Two Lost Souls as you wish; if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, email or review through FFN.   


[Part I - Two Lost Souls] 

From the beginning, this relationship has been a skewed one. It must be remembered that this takes place over a time span of three and a half years. That's a long time! Each chapter is more like a seasonal snapshot instead of a "chapter," picking up several months after the previous part left off. Both boys have clearly grown and changed from the first fall to the last winter, and there are obviously things that have occured between chapters that we are unaware of and can only surmise. 

As we are taken through their lives in Draco's narrative, his feelings are clear. He loves Harry. And after three years, it's grown beyond passing fancy or a substitute of hate or pure loneliness; by the time Harry kills him, Draco loves him so much he cannot feel anything else. I feel that Two Lost Souls is different from most in that their initial relationship does not begin with lust. In fact, Draco does not admit romantic feelings for Harry until well into the first few chapters. Once he does, he isn't overly obsessed with Harry for phsyical reasons; Draco accepts the fact that the feelings he have are more deeply rooted and - while the physical aspect of their relationship is possibly the one that keeps Harry, at least at certain times - focuses more on his mental attraction. 

Harry remains much more of an enigma, which is (IMO) as it should be. He appears to us exactly as he does to Draco. However, before I make any more statements, let me say that I wrote Harry as caring for Draco. It's not that he's a total bastard, but he doesn't allow himself to be capable of love. I fully believe that, had the battle for Azkaban not happened, Harry would have eventually let himself fall for Draco as hard as Draco fell for him. 

However, Azkaban did occur, and their relationship became more and more strained, until Harry began to view it as more of a trap than an escape. He could not allow himself to care more for Draco than anyone else; furthermore, he could not allow himself to care for anyone at all. Which brings us to:   


[Part II - Up Close And Personal With The Boy Who Lived] 

Many have expressed the sentiment that Harry is terrible to Draco and deserves, well, punishment. In truth, Harry's life has been an increasing nightmare. The beginning of Two Lost Souls is in the fall of their seventh year at Hogwarts, so we are unaware of what exactly happened between the end of the fourth book and the beginning of their seventh year, but it can be surmised that the continuing stress upon Harry made him more and more pressured. He obviously has his friendships with Ron and Hermione, though as the seasons pass he grows alienated from them and more deeply involved in Draco's life. 

Harry begins his relationship with Draco, the one to approach Draco and more or less set the terms/limits for their relationship. Not to say that he is the completely dominant one, but Harry is typically in control. The death of Draco's mother provides a spark for their reluctant companionship, one that Harry pursues out of curiosity and a sudden realization that he and Draco are not "black and white." Harry is indeed the instigator, the one who seems to be actively interested in Draco, while Draco wants no part in it and seems to be holding Harry at as much of a distance as possible. This changes in Part Four, where Draco must ask Harry for help and their roles seem reversed for the rest of the fic. 

Furthermore, Harry is unwilling to accept the fact that he owes Draco his life. (See also Ch. 11, Draco's analyzations to Ron.) I don't want to make it seem as if Harry is sane, because if he were perfectly understandable it's unlikely this would have ended in such away. Yet I don't think that he escaped without punishment, so to speak. Imagine him afterwards as you like, but I don't see him unaffected. 

Harry becomes obsessed with this idea of freedom, of walking alone so that no one can touch him. From his parents to Sirius and Cho, even the distance between him and Ron, many of the people he cares for have gone from his life. He comes to see these relationships are ties, bars of a cage he does not want to live in. As he told Draco, by now what he craves is "guarantees." Impossible? Ridiculous? Perhaps, but consider Harry's life and then decide if these thoughts are probable. 

I'd like to leave most of Harry open to interpretation, as he is the more obscure character in this piece. See him as an ice queen, see him as an utter prat, see him as wild with grief for Draco, madly in love with Draco, or uncaring at all - I don't mind. I wish to point out, however, that he is human in everything he does. Just don't paint him unquestionably black and white.   


[Part III - Up Close And Personal With The Boy Who Died] 

Draco's feelings, compared to Harry's, are more easily picked out, as he is the narrator. OOC Draco? Maybe. But his relationship with Harry developed over the course of several months, even a year, until even he could not deny it anymore. As with Harry, Draco can be actually taken however you wish despite narrating in the first person. 

Harry does seems to be the dominant one in their relationship; however, I don't want Draco to seem simply submissive. He's [hopefully] retained some hints of canon!Draco, and his companionship with Harry has not changed anything with other people, only Harry. I believe that Draco's relations with others in his life (Sirius, Dumbledore, Fiona, David, even Ron) contrast with Harry's growing distance from them, and first person narration clearly makes him more easily understood. 

What I have to say about Draco: He loves Harry. And in my opinion, which even as the writer should not duly influence yours, is that Draco wouldn't resent Harry for what Harry did. 

Maybe Draco appears overly open with his feelings, a surprising gesture considering the picture we gain of Draco from the books. Just remember that it took them _years_, not days, not weeks, not months, but years, to get to this point. 

Yeah, that's it for Draco.   


[Part IV - Common Imagery] 

Smoke: Beginning with Part One, with Draco's mother's death, I've used smoke as a reoccurring symbol of the dead. From, "Or how many spirals of smoke return to haunt..." to "Lost in that realm of smoky dreaming," it's one of the more minor links that is supposed to minutely connect these chapters. 

Glass/Steel: Draco states in Part Three, "I want to tell him that I'm not made of glass, but I can't. (Under his touch, maybe I am.)" Later, in Part Four, he adds, "If he turns me to fragile glass, I turn him to rigid steel." From this comes the reoccuring glass vs. steel idea that the titles and themes of Parts Twelve and Thirteen were based upon. I feel that this is rather self-explanatory, but wanted to point it out. 

Cages: This too is self-explanatory, especially throughout Part Fourteen, but deserved mention. Though with negative connotations, in this fic cages are not necessarily related to captivity and badness (except in Harry's mind). Harry sees any sort of entangling relationship, becoming too close with/caring for anyone, as an imprisoning cage to be avoided. "It's never better in the cage," he states repeatedly, convinced that freedom and alienation from others is all that equals real survival. Death, too, is freedom, and that is what he gives. 

Death: This (obviously) is huge. I told you to look for foreshadowing, and I promise it's there. Their entire relationship springs from the fact that Draco's mother died, and from then on they talk in the graveyard, Draco relates things about his mother's death, reflects on Harry's "Avada Kedavra" eyes. As we draw closer and closer to the end, both the war and the mentions of death escalate. Finally David and Fiona, who are younger than Draco, both perform the Killing Curse in front of his eyes on family friends, and shortly after he is made to believe that Harry has died. Sirius and Cho both perished, and later Harry himself kills Draco's father. You need only to read through and look for it to realize that Two Lost Souls isn't truly focused about love, but death. Thus I feel my ending is justified, and as it was planned to end that way from Part One, Two Lost Souls was written specifically to end that way. I've tried my hardest to rationalize and make this end believable, and I can only hope I did it justice.   


[Part V - Miscellaneous Issues] 

I love Auror Academy. I honestly do. I wanted to make it more similar to West Point or, really, any college, rather than a simple blueprint of Hogwarts. I even drew up a diagram of their dormitory. I love their dormitory. I love their school. I love Professor Engle, and Mulligan and Mulligan, and everything. Yes. 

If Sirius/Cho squicked you, I'm sorry. It happened to make a lot of sense to me and it still does. I like Sirius/Cho, the desperation in it, the potion, the way it ended. So no, I don't regret it at all. I feel it's a pivotal point in Two Lost Souls. 

And finally, for random information, my favorite line: "...and 'The Boy Who Lived' is so hideously inappropriate of a grave inscription."   


[Part VI - Final Notes] 

I thought that I should mention, Vladimir Nabokov's style in _Bend Sinister_ was what prompted me to write Two Lost Souls the way I did. Originally, it was to be a one-shot ficlet, but Autumn spawned an entire series. I'm glad. I have to say, the parentheses allowed me more creativity and fun with figurative language than I could have dreamed. I loved writing in that style, and hope that you enjoyed reading. It was amazing for me to be able to do that. Furthermore, I feel that present tense was the only way to do it, as death of the narrator would be hard to establish otherwise. 

Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" inspired the title. Lyrics can be seen above. 

This was, of course, dedicated to Christy. It would be half of what it is without the help and support of Michi MinYin Chu, ShinigamiForever, and of course Sky Sorceress and Christy. You girls made Two Lost Souls into something I'm proud to have written. I love you all. 

Finally, what's upcoming? Hopefully, though it may be awhile, I'm planning a new H/D fic, From The Ashes. And you might be surprised to find that, yes, it is planned to have a happy ending. 

Thank you. Thank you _all_. 


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